For a very long time, probably ever since I actually cared about news, I have been getting my news from the Internet. Whether it be world news, automotive news, tech news, or whatever other drivel was interesting at the time. Recently, I finally succumbed to the cries of “Use syndication, use RSS” and started making use of Google’s Personalized Homepage feature. It lets you throw multiple feeds onto a page with a Google search box at the top of it, and makes for a fairly good one stop shop for taking a glance at my news feeds.
Now the cries from the tech-y friends are changing, “use Google Reader” they say. I’ve looked at it before and to be quite honest, I didn’t find the UI very appealing. In fact, I haven’t found the UI for any feed readers I’ve tried compelling enough to make me want to use them. That goes double for feed readers which live outside of my browser and don’t let me take advantage of one of my most beloved user behaviors: opening all the articles I want to read in tabs behind the current one, then quickly scanning them and closing the tab — the next one, already loaded, appears and is ready for my consumption.
Well anyway, I thought I would give Google Reader another shot. And I naively assumed that since Google Homepage and Google Reader are run by the same people, that Google Reader would at the very least give me the option of picking which of the feeds on my home page I wanted to also read from Google Reader. At best, it would have a folder containing all of the feeds from Homepage and I could just remove or reorganize them as I saw fit. Well, neither one of those is the case. As far as I can tell, Google Reader doesn’t know, or care to know, anything about the 20+ feeds I have painstakingly plastered across the four tabs of my Google Homepage.
Here’s news for you Google: I don’t care to know about Google Reader.
I don’t comment trying to convince you to switch to Google Reader, but I do come to let you know that the most powerful thing about Google Reader is indeed its keyboard shortcuts. As a mouse hater, this saves me loads of time and frustration associated from using that silly pointer object. Have a look at the shorcuts, they converted me.
Also, Reader allows you to see images and a summary of posts, which is nice. I do not believe Google homepage allows that.
No, Google Homepage doesn’t allow that but typically I know if I want to read something based on the title anyway.
I will probably give Google Reader a try now since this whole ordeal got me to try a desktop RSS client, endo, instead. With my feeds in there, I can now import them into Google Reader and give that a shot as well.