Life is grand

Google’s feed reader has undergone a radical redesign. So radical it now resembles every other feed reader out there. The previous incarnation was loved by a few and disliked by many. It was an interesting experiment but was not succesful, unlike the GMail interface.

At first glance it is a Bloglines copy; 2 panes showing feeds on one side and items on the other. You click a feed or folder and all the unread items are displayed in a river of news down the right. You can organise by folder, you can star items, email them, share (more on that later) and add tags. Nothing exceptional and certainly not stunning (I am worried when people call a minor step forward as “stunning.”)

There are some good features though and I imagine Google Reader will follow GMail in being an incrementally improving product.

The share feature lets you mark an item as shared and this is then added to a publically available web-page which has its own Atom feed. This is useful as it lets you broadcast to the world any items you find interesting.

It is limited though in that you can’t branch the sharing out to different groups. Thankfully the tagging feature comes into play here. You can add tags to any item and then make that tag public. You can then share the public tag link with other Google Reader users and they can subscribe to it. You could tag items to target specific groups of friends and co-workers. This is a very useful feature though I’d prefer if it displayed as the sharing feature does as currently the public tags require you to be using the Google Reader.

Another novel feature is that, unlike Bloglines where clicking a feed or folder marks all unread items in it as read, Google Reader will track your scrolling and only mark as read the items you have scrolled past. This makes it very easy to start reading a list of unread items, close the reader and then come back to where you last where.

Starring like in GMail works well, useful for coming back to items later to read. The feed management interface is a bit clunky but works well enough for now.

One thing I have noticed is that Bloglines seems to be faster both in using and in noticing updates in feeds. Hopefully Google Reader catches up in those two regards.

All in all it is Bloglines plus some useful features and mechanisms. I like it but feel it is hardly ground breaking and that there is so much more potential in aggregator applications. I will be swapping to Google Reader not because it is stunning but because it is mildly better.