Google Reader – contender for the online aggregator throne?

Screenshot of Google ReaderI wrote a while back about how Rojo’s upgrade was a disaster and that it had led me to look for alternatives.

Bloglines didn’t have the same feeling of a polished interface that Rojo has tempted me with but unlike Rojo but it has been happily consuming the feeds of all my sites and presenting them without fuss or issue since I started using it a few weeks ago.

I got back from London this weekend and found that Google has finally upgraded the user interface for their online reader offering to something on-par with some of the others (at last!)

Apart from looking like Google Mail it also has a great feature whereby as you scroll down items it highlights the current one and if you scroll past it then it assumes it has been read.

This is great compared to the “I’ve read everything in this group” button of Rojo and Bloglines “Well you clicked group X that had 100 posts so I’m assuming it’s read”.

Another cool feature seems to be the response time at which Google Reader picks up articles. It even picked up this article within 3 minutes on my little blog.

Of course the best part of all this is thanks to the guys behind OPML moving from one reader to another is just a case of exporting from one and importing to another – even groups are preserved.

[)amien

2 responses

  1. Avatar for Steve

    Cool, I've been using Google Reader for a while, but just as a simple box in my personalised Google page rather than the full interface - I didn't mention it when I read your Rojo post since I figured if you used that, you had more sophisticated needs.

    My needs are simple because I don't subscribe to that many feeds - I don't have the time in the day to keep up with that many sites and too many feeds soon becomes a choking avalanche, even with a 'clever' tool - simply because no tool is yet capable of filtering out 'uninteresting' stories. What I really need is someone to read the news for me and pick out the best stuff ;)

    Steve 10 October 2006
  2. Avatar for Damien Guard

    One of the directions online readers are going is the ability to rate/tag/star posts you liked or enjoyed.

    I'm hoping that a combination of this rating, tags and perhaps being able to associate your interests with other users will hopefully take us one step close to the "Smart Agent" technology we were promised many years ago.

    Damien Guard 10 October 2006