May 26, 2007

Google Reader: Pros and Cons

Google Reader was spotted on my computer at work and I got asked if I liked using it. My initial thought was that I love it, but I've thought about it and here are my pros and cons.

Pros
1. It follows me whichever computer I'm using.
2. Easy subscription process built into Firefox/Google Toolbar.
3. Although I haven't used the sharing feature, I think it's pretty cool.
4. The view is clean and easy to read, however, see con #2.
5. The stars like in gmail are a good way to bookmark great articles, or longer articles you want to go back and read later.

Cons
1. It seems to have quite a lag in updating feeds. In Sharpreader, as soon as I would post something it would show up, in Google it could be hours.
2. It bypasses traffic counters, so people who read my blog via Google reader don't show up in my stats...people who's blogs I read via Google Reader don't know I've stopped by.
3. It's not easy to go back and read something again, once you read something it pretty much disappears, you have to click all feeds/all items to view read items.

Things From Other Services That Would Make Google Reader Better
Sharpreader's notifier was great, and new items came in fairly instantly. Maybe a Google Reader blinker built into Gtalk that you could chose which feeds to notify you when new items come in.
Bloglines' feature of seeing who is subscribed to a feed and what other feeds they're subsribed to was a great feature. I'm sure there's some level of this built into Google Reader, but if it's not in the top of the feed, I'm not going to look too far to find it.

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