Say hello to Google Reader, the newest addition to the world of web syndication feed aggregators.
It’s slow as hell at the moment, but I’m guessing that’s due to it just having been introduced and maybe not fully deployed throughout the Googleverse. We’ll see how fast it is once they’ve had a chance to actually get it stabilized. On the bright side, it accepted my metric ton of feeds in an OPML export from NetNewsWire without complaint.
Seems pretty neat and whizbang so far—ooh, ahh—but it’s just too clunky, chunky, and cute for me. It’s got big, fat, blue toy borders around everything. And, despite having nice keyboard accellerators, it spends an awful lot of time animating the scrolling strip under the “book magnifier”.
(You know, those things they sell to people who want the Large Print edition of Readers’ Digest? I’ll probably need one someday.)
But, then again, I never caught the Gmail buzz either. Too much AJAX, not enough IMAP. To be fair to this lens thing, though, I’m an admitted info freako outlier who’ll probably be approaching 1K feeds before the year’s out. That said, I suspect I’m just ahead of my time and more people will be where I am, eventually.
Anyway, what I look for in a feed reader is how well it enables speed skimming: I’m going to ignore 70-90% of what I see in feeds, so I don’t want an aggregator which helps me carefully and methodically pick my way across the headlines.
No, I want something which lets me scream through feeds as fast as my eyes can move and a finger can slap the space bar. I’ll queue up what I really want to read in browser tabs or some other temporary storage, but I’m not going to want to spend more than a split second on a headline.
The other thing I want is more machine intelligence. For example, for my book (which you should buy), I built a popular links feed generator which skims links out of all the entries from all my feed and ranks them by number of mentions. This is the first feed I read each day, because it’s the most valuable.
From there, I read feeds produced by sites like Technorati and Feedster, followed by feeds on topics I’ve currently prioritized. If I have time, I eventually wade deeper into my feed list and even reach the end some days. If I had more machine intelligence helping, I might never actually have to make it through the whole list to catch what I really want to catch.
Basically, what I look for in aggregators is assistance in attenuation. I want to push as much as possible out of my front-and-center attention, let other processes deal with things, and discard with wild abandon. This is not email, where every postcard that falls through the slot could be a message addressed directly to me. I don’t want to manage these pieces of information in onesies and twosies.
No, my subscriptions are the rapids in the river of news and these water-wings don’t help me.
One Comment
the google new reader HATED my OPML from bloglines with is arounf 150 deep.
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[...] Google has released a web-based RSS reader and aggregator that is pretty nice. You can read all posts from all the feeds you subscribe to in a chronological order, or you can just read from a specific feed. It has lots of AJAX and a pretty smooth interface with shortcut keys that really speed up using it, although some people say it’s too slow. But I don’t read 1000 feeds. My issue with it is that it’s web-based, and while I’m employed building web software and I love the web as a universal platform, I still have to go to the website when I want to read my feeds, they’re not delivered to my desktop like in my email client. I’ll see how it goes. [...]
[...] As co-author of the world’s leading book on syndication* I guess I’m obliged to say a little more about Google’s Reader. Like certain other authors of leading books on syndication my first impressions were largely negative, but got significantly better. Les Orchard wins the prize for best put-down: Big, blue, chunky water-wings. His follow-up is sharp: Thing is, Reader is so good at being what it is. I’m just critical because it’s good at being what I don’t want. [...]
[...] So, I’ve been playing with Google Reader a bit, and overall, it’s another slick Google AJAX app. However, I agree with Les over at OxDECAFBAD that it doesn’t really meet the needs of people who are used to reading lots and lots of feeds: Anyway, what I look for in a feed reader is how well it enables speed skimming: I’m going to ignore 70-90% of what I see in feeds, so I don’t want an aggregator which helps me carefully and methodically pick my way across the headlines.No, I want something which lets me scream through feeds as fast as my eyes can move and a finger can slap the space bar. I’ll queue up what I really want to read in browser tabs or some other temporary storage, but I’m not going to want to spend more than a split second on a headline. [...]