Google Reader - Review
I was going to hold off doing this for a little longer, but I decided now is as good a time as any. I’ve had a lot of problems with Bloglines in the past. It’s been okay, but far from perfect. Anyway, I decided to circle back around and give Google Reader another try. I know, I know…I work for Yahoo!. The fact of the matter is, if Yahoo! had an aggregator worthy of my time, I’d use it. And yes, I realize there’s an aggregator in the product I work on. I’ll leave it at that.
I tried Google Reader a while back and I really didn’t like it. What made me try it again was a comment from someone on the Reader team to one of my earlier posts about drinking from the RSS firehose. The stats looked compelling, so I gave it a go. I exported my OPML from Bloglines and imported it into Google Reader. So far, so good.
I’ve decided I’m a fan of the “stream” model of reading feeds. Google mixes my feeds, displaying them to me in what appears to be chronological order with the latest items coming first. This is nice because I always start with the freshest content. If I begin to fall behind in keeping up with my feeds, at least I’m keeping up with what’s topical.
The keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader are also really good. Not only are they easy to use, but it’s very infrequent that the focus gets screwed up so badly that the shortcuts don’t work. In other apps I’ve used that make heavy use of shortcuts, I often find that it’s easy to have the focus lost so the keyboard shortcuts no longer work until you reestablish focus properly.
The sharing aspect is also nice. You get a sort of a linkblog where you can share interesting feed items. This is a neat way of sharing cool stuff you find with friends and coworkers. I’m always passing around links in IM and email, this is much better. I could bookmark it in del.icio.us or something, but I really like keeping these links separate.
So by now you’re probably thinking, “hey, Google Reader sounds awesome.” This is the part where I totally burst your bubble. I have a couple of issues with Google Reader:
- It’s a hog. I’ve paired down checking my feeds to once or twice a day. That means I have potentially hundreds of feed items waiting for me. Google Reader does a sort of progressive loading in the reading frame. It loads the first X items for you to read. When you get to the bottom of the list, it appends another X entries and you keep scrolling. Over time, the number of entries can get to be quite large. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with why Reader is such a hog, but I’ve noticed when that frame starts getting really long that: a) my laptop fans start spinning much faster and louder, b) jumping from one item to the next sometimes hangs for seconds and c) tab switching in Firefox slows down considerably.
- When I’m on a feed item, I sometimes decide right on the spot that I don’t like that feed anymore. In Bloglines, there’s a link at the top that will let me unsubscribe. In Google Reader, there’s no way to unsubscribe when you’re looking at the item. Instead, I have to click the “Manage Subscriptions” link and locate the feed I’m on so I can unsubscribe. I’m subscribed to over 200 feeds. Finding that feed isn’t easy. If it’s a search feed it might be near impossible. Just let me unsubscribe right there on the spot.
- Here’s one I only realized tonight and it’s probably the one that offends me the most. When you’re viewing a feed item, you can use the “v” shortcut to open the original page of the feed item in another window/tab. This is useful for feeds that aren’t full-text or feeds like Ze Frank’s that point to a movie. This is a really useful feature. However…if you have a popup blocker you’re going to run into a problem. In my case, the Firefox popup blocker tells me that it stopped a popup. I say, “that’s okay” because I actually want this popup. So I allow it. Mother of god…what have I done? Google Reader is hosted off of www.google.com. If you want to allow popups for Google Reader, you end up ultimately allowing popups for all pages on www.google.com. Duh-umb.
- The stats are okay, but I feel they could be more useful.
- The percentage read stat is pretty much useless to me. They should really call it percentage seen. I scan the titles of posts and decide if I’m going to actually read them or not. Scanning the title is enough for Google to say you’ve read it. So Google’s percent read doesn’t really mean anything to me. At the end of the day, my percent read is 100%.
- The frequently updated stat is also useless. They sort it by most frequently updated to least frequently updated and then only show you the top 10-40 entries. I’d like to see the least frequently updated, that would tell me which blogs aren’t publishing much of anything, which may be a sure sign it’s time to unsubscribe. There is a last updated report, which lets you see the list of the 10-40 most stale feeds…but that’s not quite the same.
- What I’d really like to see is some breakdown of the least read and least interesting feeds. If I’m not reading the feed items (just scanning the titles and skipping the bodies), I want to ditch the feed. Likewise, if I am reading the feed items but haven’t found many (or any) that are interesting, I also want to ditch the feed. The stats are obviously in the Google system, they just need to surface them.
So what’s the verdict? Well…it’s better than Bloglines. I actually mostly like it. It fits with how I like to enjoy my feeds. If they could work on making the stats more useful and also take care of the usability issues involved in unsubscribing from a feed, it would be much better. Then, if they could make it less of a hog, it would make my computer so much happier. I’ll probably continue using it over Bloglines at this point.
January 13th, 2007 at 4:49 am
I desesperate to wait a Yahoo! Reader :o(
I believe that Yahoo! don’t want to promote RSS technology against they announce last year.
Why ? See bellow:
- No feeds into Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Actualités (France), Yahoo! Photos, etc.
- Lot of failures or bad coding* into actual feed (Flickr, 360, Shoposphere, groups, etc).
- Not usefull tool or features to read or subscribe to feed (Yahoo! Mail Beta and My Yahoo!)
(*) I created mYLastRSS php class with some features which help to fix these problems. Published on SourceForge.
I’m Yahoo!maniac, and I must use Google Reader against my feeling :o((
January 13th, 2007 at 5:40 am
Hi Ryan,
I’m glad you’re giving Reader a shot. Your issues are generally legitimate, and they’ll be added to our list of feedback. Here’s a few comments/workarounds:
To unsubscribe more easily, you can just click on the feed title in the item. When viewing only items from a feed, the “Feed settings…” menu has an unsubscribe command.
I’m not sure I understand the reticence to allow pop-ups on google.com. This is only necessary because Firefox does not consider a key press a valid trigger for a new window being open. However, we generally have a no pop-up policy (http://www.google.com/help/nopopupads.html) so you’re hopefully not opening the door to a flood of ads.
Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer
January 13th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Mihai:
Clicking on the feed title takes me away from the “all” view. That means when I come back to the “all” view, I’ve lost my place. I have to start reading all of my feed items again. Who knows, maybe the next item looked really interesting. By now, however, it may be burried several items down since the “all” page has re-rendered the list of feed items. Why not add the menu next to the feed title in the “all” view? Save me a click.
As for popups, what I want to do is allow popups for Google Reader. But what I end up doing is allowing popups for Google Reader as well as the rest of Google. If Google ever changes their no pop-up policy, I’ll just start getting popups since a change in your policy doesn’t mean a change in my browser setting. It’s simply a matter of Google taking advantage of my trust in one application by extending it to others. I’m sure Google would never do anything evil. I’m not really concerned about popups from Google. It’s just the principle of the matter.
Anyway, thanks for a fairly enjoyable feed reader. I hope to one day use a Yahoo! reader that puts Google Reader to shame (or at least gives it a run for the money).
Ryan
January 13th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
I’ve done the RSS Reader run through several times over the past year. I’ve settled in on using NewsGator.com and I often wonder why more people don’t use it. It’s better (faster, lighter) than Bloglines and offers similar if not better organization features.
Well worth a look.
January 14th, 2007 at 8:17 am
I haven’t given Reader a go… Thought about it after reading a posting from somebody — probably the same one you did — I started using Netvibes a while ago. At one level it’s just MyYahoo (or is that My Excite …) on steroids, it’s pretty slick. I’ve just started using the tabs to really organize things, which makes it easier to prioritize the stuff I’m reading.
January 15th, 2007 at 12:39 am
Dave, I looked at NewsGator a while back and I remember not liking it. I went back tonight and a few things jumped out at me. First, it has ads. Second, it has paging. Nobody like paging…especially when there doesn’t appear to be any keyboard shortcuts (if there are shortcuts, they aren’t well advertised). The keyboard shortcuts alone already make it painful to use. Even Bloglines has keyboard shortcuts.
January 15th, 2007 at 12:42 am
Koblas, unfortunately a portal isn’t what I’m looking for. With the number of feeds I follow, a portal model doesn’t quite scale for me.
January 15th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Interesting post Ryan. Firstly, I’m not sure I understand your worries about Google having popups in the future. I’d be much more worried about Yahoo personally, unless they already do?
Also if you don’t want to lose your place, just open ‘Manage Subscriptions’ in a new tab/window. The only problem is you have to read the rest of the unread posts.
To be fair to Reader, we can think of problems with it, but if you compare it to the next best it’s miles ahead. When they add search capabilities, it’ll be difficult to argue for any of the other current competitors.
January 15th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Well, given the latest security bug Google had where people could get their blogger content served from http://www.google.com, maybe now you can understand why I wish Reader ran on it’s own hostname. The list of services running on http://www.google.com is broad. I don’t trust them all.
Why do you worry more about Yahoo! than Google? Yahoo! has a similar “no popup” rule. It’s pretty amusing how much people trust Google because…they’re Google.
I wouldn’t say Reader is miles ahead. There’s still the issue that at times it tries to melt down my laptop by resource hogging. I’d say it has a slim lead over Bloglines and both have a rather wide margin over the rest of the online readers I’ve tried out.
As for search, I really don’t care about searching my aggregator. I’m more interested in useful search feeds. I used Google’s search feed functionality a while back. It was really quite awful. I’ve since unsubscribed from all of my Google search feeds. Technorati, Ice Rocket and the others are really no better. When it comes down to it, every 12-24 hours all of the feeds start spewing the same links I saw the last time they refreshed.
January 18th, 2007 at 8:31 am
Just an observation about popup behavior. I’m not disagreeing with your principal at all. I’m extremely critical of popups myself.
I’ve been using the same firefox configuration for years, literally carrying settings with me between whole operating systems and through major revisions of firefox. In all this time, I have only six exceptions in my popup blocker configuration. Two of them are for google. In all this time, I’ve never had any issues with popups from google.
So, like I said, I agree with your principal and it should have its own domain, it’s just my experience that google can be trusted in that area.
Besides, if it causes problems later, you can always remove the exception…