Google Reader
Saturday, October 7th, 2006
Yes I’ll be a consumer whore again. Ive fallen in love with Google Reader. I love RSS. The idea of the “river of news” is one of the best things ever. It has almost every damn thing you would ever want in a rss reader. I have went though a few of them also. The idea of a pc based reader was something I did not care for. In this day and age something webbased is deffinatly where it is at. So I went so far as loading up a program called Gregarus on my webserver. It did the job, but not completely. It read the news but little things like auto updating it didnt do. The PC based feedreader was pretty close to what I wanted on an interface but fell into the problem of how do i know what ive read at work and what Ive read here at home. Same with Lifera at work, a linux based reader. It worked, but just not exactly how I liked it.
So Google Reader… we love Google and their motto…”do no evil”. Ok sure they are tracking what I look at, what I click, where I go…all of it. Do I care? No. Some get worried Google will have to much info on our lives, but thats a small price to pay. As Steve Gilmore says, its all about “Gestures” and “Attention”. If you dont know those terms yet … Google Steve Gilmore Guestures or Steve Gilmore Attention. Google gets it. What I dont understand is why the reader is lacking one giant thing on its page….A SEARCH BOX! I mean come on Google…what are you known for after all. I can sorta see why putting one on there is questionable, but its at the same time a no brainer in my opinion.
It has keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING, +10 points to Google. It has a snappy interface that is clean yet effective, +2 points. It easily imports and exports opml files, +.5 as this should be a default for any reader by now. Tagging, more on that later, +5. Shareing of posts, again more later, +3. Has a mobile version +10….the list can go on
The idea of tagging is something born of the Web2.0 world. The idea you can put a label on something with general words that you can sort by…or relate to others with the same labels. I have slowly worked into tagging. Some people go crazy giving 20 tags to everything they do. I try to give one or two for things I want to go back on. You can see a basic idea of tags on this post as its posted under general crap and software… But this is only a small way to use them. You can use them to say go look though Flikr to find pictures relating in someway to your tag….or any other tag based systems.
Sharing. This is quite interesting. My Share Site. At first I was like this is pointless. But not really. It lets you see what I want you to see out of my feeds. Instead of spamming up your inbox with tons of emails of, hey look at this…I can just point you to my share page and you can see them there. I like sharing links of interesting things. But after one or two emails in one day I feel like Im spamming people. Plus after a while I know they will get pissy about it. So from now on Ill likely just send a link to the share site and say, ‘hey look at the top five there’ or the such.
So….damn Im a consumer whore. I love finding new products and software that just works. This whole computer thing shouldnt be hard. If it doesnt work within the first 5 seconds….and is easy….screw it whats the point. I shouldnt have to work for all this. It should just…..work.
Yes I’ll be a consumer whore again. Ive fallen in love with Google Reader. I love RSS. The idea of the “river of news” is one of the best things ever. It has almost every damn thing you would ever want in a rss reader. I have went though a few of them also. The idea of a pc based reader was something I did not care for. In this day and age something webbased is deffinatly where it is at. So I went so far as loading up a program called Gregarus on my webserver. It did the job, but not completely. It read the news but little things like auto updating it didnt do. The PC based feedreader was pretty close to what I wanted on an interface but fell into the problem of how do i know what ive read at work and what Ive read here at home. Same with Lifera at work, a linux based reader. It worked, but just not exactly how I liked it.
So Google Reader… we love Google and their motto…”do no evil”. Ok sure they are tracking what I look at, what I click, where I go…all of it. Do I care? No. Some get worried Google will have to much info on our lives, but thats a small price to pay. As Steve Gilmore says, its all about “Gestures” and “Attention”. If you dont know those terms yet … Google Steve Gilmore Guestures or Steve Gilmore Attention. Google gets it. What I dont understand is why the reader is lacking one giant thing on its page….A SEARCH BOX! I mean come on Google…what are you known for after all. I can sorta see why putting one on there is questionable, but its at the same time a no brainer in my opinion.
It has keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING, +10 points to Google. It has a snappy interface that is clean yet effective, +2 points. It easily imports and exports opml files, +.5 as this should be a default for any reader by now. Tagging, more on that later, +5. Shareing of posts, again more later, +3. Has a mobile version +10….the list can go on
The idea of tagging is something born of the Web2.0 world. The idea you can put a label on something with general words that you can sort by…or relate to others with the same labels. I have slowly worked into tagging. Some people go crazy giving 20 tags to everything they do. I try to give one or two for things I want to go back on. You can see a basic idea of tags on this post as its posted under general crap and software… But this is only a small way to use them. You can use them to say go look though Flikr to find pictures relating in someway to your tag….or any other tag based systems.
Sharing. This is quite interesting. My Share Site. At first I was like this is pointless. But not really. It lets you see what I want you to see out of my feeds. Instead of spamming up your inbox with tons of emails of, hey look at this…I can just point you to my share page and you can see them there. I like sharing links of interesting things. But after one or two emails in one day I feel like Im spamming people. Plus after a while I know they will get pissy about it. So from now on Ill likely just send a link to the share site and say, ‘hey look at the top five there’ or the such.
So….damn Im a consumer whore. I love finding new products and software that just works. This whole computer thing shouldnt be hard. If it doesnt work within the first 5 seconds….and is easy….screw it whats the point. I shouldnt have to work for all this. It should just…..work.
