Bloglines you got competition. First impressions : it has a nice interface, with all the Ajax goodness we expect from Google. It has the same look and feel as Gmail. It has labels which can help with creating groups and all. I think just like MyYahoo, this could be a big step forward for RSS and its mass adoption. I am surprised that Google did not do this sooner, for this is low-hanging fruit for them. My biggest worry with this: my vanishing html page-views. I get a feeling if Google could make it faster, leaner and meaner, well I would have no problems switching away from Bloglines.
I tried to upload the OPML export file from NetNewsWire, and failed the first time. Perhaps, because my OPML was “grouped.” Not sure if that is the case, but then tried it using flat OPML, and the import went smoothly, even if painfully slow. So when you open the reader, you find, that only the most recent updated items show up, and you click on them and read them in the white space, as you would be reading an email. Adding new feeds is pretty easy, and simple.
They have a nifty little “search for content” button, and you type in say “web 2.0″ and you get a lot of sources writing about that subject and not in your feed-roll. This is the kind of stuff, our friends at Technorati should have done, but have not. More thoughts later… (Hey Google gang - how about taking this design principle and applying it to Google News and GMail.)
16 comments so far
11:53 AM PT
Here’s how to import your My Yahoo subscriptions if ya wanna give Google’s reader a spin…
Good ol’ Jeremy.
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005384.html
12:25 PM PT
One note, everybody forgets about Kinja but it rocks for quickly surveying rss feeds….uses the “river of news” approach and is much lighter-weight than Bloglines.
(no i’m not affiliated with it ;)
1:26 PM PT
[...] Hopefully it’s not truly as slow as it currently is. There’s no way in hell I could use it at this speed. It looks fun though. Thanks to Matt for the news. Om Malik’s Broadband Blog has the news too. [...]
2:16 PM PT
Google Reader
Today Google announced Google Reader at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Google Reader is a web-based feed reader to help find and subscribe to online RSS or Atom feeds. Om Malik gives his first impressions of all the
3:34 PM PT
it would be interesting to see the concept of the Context search feature that yahoo is exploring, in conjunction with reading an particular item to see more info - somewhat like alexa.com but not at a site level.
http://yq.search.yahoo.com/
On second thought, maybe that would just be the Related links feature that google already has?
4:40 PM PT
[...] Om Malik has his thoughts on it… [...]
4:41 PM PT
I agree it needs more speed and perfection. Most of the time I was stuck at the loading or oops error occured :)
My take here http://www.emergintex.com/blog/?p=105
6:10 PM PT
[...] But does the world need another RSS company? Not after Google Reader, or when Yahoo’s version of that comes out next week. [...]
8:56 PM PT
[...] Today, Om Malik wrote about the new Google Reader, another entry in the world of feed readers. There have been a few issues with speed as well as stalls, but I’ve had a chance to play with Reader for a bit. Google Reader uses an AJAX enhanced interface, similar to Gmail. [...]
9:00 PM PT
I wonder about some of the design choices. I’m not finding an option to group my feeds, I can only see each individual post as it comes in. Also, I can’t update the official Google blog through Bloglines since Reader launched. What an interesting coincidence.
7:30 AM PT
[...] 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. [...]
5:19 PM PT
The reason it was painfully slow was because reader was slashdotted. Hehe.
5:55 PM PT
[...] For a beta service, Google Reader is a pretty nice tool and includes a search feature that adds a “subscribe” button to the links returned with the search results, which of course are narowed down to only websites that have feeds. Here’s some more feedback on Google Reader from Om Malik, Niall Kennedy and TechCrunch. tags: google, rss – posted by Scott Beale on Sunday, October 9th, 2005 Comments RSS feed | Trackback URL [...]
4:25 PM PT
Actually I think the Google Read is pretty cool, and since its going to be used by thousands upon thousands of people, it will probably end up being devved up quite well.
9:10 AM PT
[...] Being web browser based it has all the usual drawbacks and advantages. AJAX goodness on one hand and “Arrgh! The page has been corrupted” on the other. [...]
7:06 PM PT
Yet another AJAX RSS Feed Reader which display RSS Feeds in draggable auto-arranging AJAX Feed Windows which self-updates as RSS Feed is updated.
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