… and it belongs in beta. I’ll get to the review in a second. First, for those of you who aren’t interested in how it works (or doesn’t), why does this new product announced at Web 2.0 matter? It’s another piece of Google’s effort to keep users on its own sites. Depending on the feed, users can keep up with posts without ever leaving Google. This isn’t dramatically different from a lot of other newsreaders but it’s addtional evidence that Google no longer is content to provide passage to other sites. It wants to be a destination, where users spend large amounts of time between searches. It’s also limited to users with a Google account, adding to the reasons people might be willing to get a Google log-in. It also expands the likely universe of feed subscribers.
For me as a user — and as a journalist being published online — the issues with Google Reader go beyond the ubiquitous server errors those of us using Gmail recognize all too well, the browser crash when I tried to import subscriptions and the tedious load times on opening day. More important, the search for new feeds is flawed. For instance, our posts show up in Google Blog Search via our RSS feed but a search for “paidcontent” in Google Reader didn’t offer that feed as an option. Instead, the subscribe options included a Technorati “paidcontent” tag feed (not one from del.icio.us), our domant ContentNext series, and feeds from Marc Canter, Jason Calacanis, Gawker and a couple of others. Even worse, the wording makes it look as though the site doesn’t have a feed: “Not all sites have feeds yet so some sites may not have content available for subscription.” In other words, if you don’t see it here, it doesn’t exist.
What happens when you click on one of those options? It goes to another Google screen, not the blog in question. That screen lets you scroll through every post without leaving Google — it even includes the art; if the full posts show up in the RSS feed they seem to show up here.
The reader promises a lot of functionality — subscription imports and exports using OPML, the ability to add feeds, options for gmail this, blog this (only works on Google’s own Blogger), relatively easy subscribe and unsubscribe, keyboard shortcuts, etc. But Google is determined to use its own language — labels, for instance, instead of tags. No mention of RSS or Atom on the front page. It’s not integrated into Google’s personalized home page, which means the same user can have RSS feeds in one place and not see the same ones in the other.
It’s also using some of these features to promote Google. If I “gmail this” the resulting message starts with “This item was sent to you by * from Google Reader.” and ends with “Try Google Reader today: http://www.google.com/reader/.” Even the subject starts with “From Google Reader.” At least, they’ve got the branding down pat. The rest is still a work in progress.
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