Google Reader was where I spent most of my browsing time, but now, it’s shutting down. Time for alternatives, but not just for Reader: for all Google products. I’m not sure when one of these might go down, become paid, or become unusable. I just uninstalled Google Drive and Google Talk. but I don’t use it much (I use Skype), so no loss. I’ll leave Chrome for the while, but I’m hearing reports that Firefox is improving faster than Chrome is. Or there’s Chromium. ...
I have only two problems with Google Reader. The first is that it doesn’t support authenticated feeds. Ideally, I’d have liked to have a single reading list that combines my e-mail with newsfeeds. GMail offers RSS feeds of your e-mail. But the feeds require authentication (obviously) and Google Reader doesn’t support that right now. (So I usually don’t read e-mail :-) The second is that it’s tough to manage large feeds. It’s a personal quirk, really. I like to read all entries. If there are 100, I read all 100. If there are 1000, I struggle but read all 1000. I’m too scared to “Mark all read” because there are some sources that I don’t want to miss. ...
I’ve stopped visiting websites. No, really. There’s only one website I visit these days. Google Reader. Google Reader is a feed reader. If you want to just catch up on the new stuff on a site, you can add the site to Google Reader. Anything new that is published on the site appears in Google Reader. Right now, I’ve subscribed to over 50 feeds. There’s no way I can remember to visit 50 sites – so I’m actually able to read more and miss less. ...
Though Google Reader learns to share, I haven’t found it easy to see what others are reading. Even a Google search for shared lists reveals very few.
Google Feed API to be released soon. While on Google, there’s some rumour about Google Purchases being used for video rentals – and eventually on to micropayments, competing with Paypal. Also, William Slawski maps Google’s acquisitions. Comments Ashwin 1 Jan 2006 3:13 pm: Anand, you have a similar look of Prasanna. (Hero of Tamil film: Kanda Naal Mudhal) S Anand 2 Jan 2006 11:25 am: Gosh, thanks! :-)
Windows Live Local tries to match Google Maps. But Google Maps is just too fast. As I mentioned earlier (Why Google Reader): the reason I like Google is largely speed.>
I switched to Google Reader as my blog reader (I was using Mozilla so far). The reason was simple: speed. Thanks to the Google site’s speed and keyboard navigation, I can read blog entries 10 times faster. Now there’s a unique proposition for Google that a lot of people are missing: that their site loads a whole lot faster than others. It makes a huge difference to the whole browsing experience. ...
Google Reader. Gmail principles applied to RSS. You can subscribe to posts, label feeds and star RSS items. The reader suggests items from your subscriptions based on your interest.