Today, it’s Google Reader: essentially GMail for RSS and Atom feeds. It’s quite nifty.
8 thoughts on “Another day, another Google service”
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Today, it’s Google Reader: essentially GMail for RSS and Atom feeds. It’s quite nifty.
Comments are closed.
Not bad at all. I’m using it to search for RSS feeds to add to my Firefox bookmarks toolbar :)
I’ve been meaning to get an RSS reader for ages and, since it’s Google, I decided to try this.
I can’t believe I ever managed to live without a reader. I couldn’t tell you whether it’s good or not compared to other readers, but it’s really easy to use for someone like me who’s never used one before. The shortcut keys are really handy.
Google are going to take over the world! My guess is they’ll have an Operating System out in a few years time. I’m all for them teaming up with Sun. Open Office (and Star Office) are excellent.
> I can’t believe I ever managed to live without a reader.
Aye, they’re handy. Particularly if you’re a news junkie like me.
Personally I prefer software to the web services (I use netnewswire on the Mac) but you should have a look at sites such as Newsgator, Bloglines and so on. They’re arguably much better than Google’s effort.
> Open Office (and Star Office) are excellent.
If you’re on Windows, give the beta of OpenOffice.org 2.0 a go. It’s a big step forward.
I’ve tried readers, and just don’t really like them. Don’t know why. I can see how good they are, but they’re not for me.
I use ’em for three key reasons: the sheer number of things I want/need to keep track of; the ability to apply my own stylesheet (which is bloody handy given the design of some blogs out there) and the speed at which you can scan/sort/select interesting things.
But it’s horses for courses, of course.
I think the main reason I find the reader so useful is similar to Gary: keeping track of lots of news.
I’m trying to keep up to date with industry news for work, and it can be difficult to sort through a site and find the interesting, useful stuff. With a reader, I can quickly see the latest headlines and just ignore it if I’m not interested.
You can go a step further: set up a search and then subscribe to that rather than to the feeds it searches. If that makes sense.
For me, Bloglines is better than a dedicated reader as I can use it from home or any PC at work. I rarely go onto the web now that I’ve subscribed to so many RSS feeds. Via RSS I can keep up with 100-150 sites a day — no way could I do that via traditional bookmarks. If a site doesn’t provide a feed, it tends to get added to Firefox’s bookmarks and soon forgotten.