Google Reader: AJAX-Enabled RSS/XML Aggregator

Contributor Icon Contributed by AlexTheBeast Date Icon October 7, 2005  
Tag Icon Tagged: Google

We all knew it was going to happen. Here’s the first review of Google Reader — Google’s RSS Aggregator.

    It’s AJAX, it’s sexy, it’s an RSS Reader to kill all other RSS readers.

    reader.google.com

    You first login with your typical google sign-in. The stepwise drawing the user into a portal system is taking hold. “Why not just hit gmail and my RSS at the same time?” many people will ask.

    The AJAX “everything slides around” eye-candy is there.

    Google is obviously embracing tags… although they call them labels. Every subscription and every post in every subscription can be uniquely tagged for later search quickness.

    Feeds and feed entries can also be starred (like gmail) or easy recovery.

    OPML importing and exporting is easily handled and will many users to switch very quickly.

    Speaking of quickness, google is fast. Speed has been my biggest complaint against all the online web aggregators so far… and so far Google Reader is fast. Of course, you could argue that it is not under stress yet; however, it is hard for me to imagine that google lets a server get killed.




    On the negative side, I saw quite a few errors using IE. This is odd for a google beta. In IE the gmail this and blogthis! options gave me errors. In firefox, however, these worked like a charm. Clicking either of these would prepackage your current selection into a gmail or blogger post respectively.

    Keyboard shortcuts are easily used as well:
    Keyboard shortcuts: j - next, k - prev, n - page down, p - page up, h - top, r - refresh, s - star

    This may be the first online aggregator that actually can compete with the speed and features of offline versions.

    What’s wrong with it then? It is not open! You should be able to email feed entries to other accounts other than gmail. You should be able to blog with systems other than blogger. Seeing labels (tags) of other users would be valuable, although honestly it is impossible to see if that’s a choice now or not. Plus, you just know that ads will be appearing on it once it gets popular too.

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  • Anonymous
    You can e-mail your posts to other e-mail clients, you'll just have to send it FROM your gmail account. (This doesn't seem unreasonable to me because, how would they know your Yahoo pswd to pop up a pre-populated compose screen? And since they don't have your addresses to know who you will e-mail to - why should they pop up your desktop client?)

    When I used the feature, it popped up a window and the window was pre-populated with a "compose" screen in gmail, but it didn't seem to prevent me from e-mailing to my friends who use Yahoo mail.
  • davak
    Certainly!

    You can also setup gmail to email through other accounts if you wish.
  • Anonymous
    I like it very much. People say it's worse than Bloglines, but I like the approach, it's very friendly, and fast.
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