A review of the new Google Reader
If you haven’t heard, the Google Reader team just released a complete overhaul of the Reader UI. I wasn’t a big fan of the previous interface, though I imagine it would have been nice enough with a small number of feeds. So how does the new interface match up to the current champion, Bloglines?
Verdict: I Like It!
I’m very particular about my RSS readers. They must be online, they must use a “river of news” view, and they must make it easy for me to quickly skim a large number of feed items. It should also be fairly easy for me to manage my subscriptions.
Bloglines does all of these things right. It may use frames, but those frames mean that I can view all of my feed items at once. I can easily view feeds by groups or all feeds at once, and I only see new items unless I ask for old items, I can easily mark everything as read, I can easily manage my feeds, and I can easily subscribe to feeds.
Google Reader use a river of news view, so it’s easy to skim the items in a feed. I can mark individual items as read or an entire feed as read. I’ve always liked how Bloglines marks all items as read when I view them, but a couple of recent crashes (NY Times, I’m looking at you) have made me rethink this idea. Google Reader only marks items as read when it knows you’ve read them — items are marked off as you scroll past them, or you can do it yourself with key commands. For the first time ever, Google Reader has me hooked on keyboard shortcuts. I’m using J and K to quickly skim items and mark them as read. It’s all AJAy, so it only loads about 20 items at a time. Fortunately, Loading new items is pretty fast, and it happens automatically, but it’s still slower than Bloglines’ frame setup. I don’t feel like I’m taking much longer to scan than I do with Bloglines though. I can view all unread items, unread items by label, and unread items by feed depending on my whim (handy when I’ve been away for some time).
The biggest problem is feed management. I imported my subscriptions via OPML from Bloglines, but some of my categories weren’t imported. Also, I’m confused about the difference between labels and folders. Are they the same or different? If they’re the same, how come they don’t act like the labels in Gmail? Gmail lets me have spaces in label names, Google Reader doesn’t. I can’t rename tags (are those labels? folders?) for some reason. Actually, I can’t rename labels and folders either (if they happen to be distinct from tags). If they could make feed management easier, I would consider Google Reader to be the first feed reader I’ve found that gives Bloglines a good fight.