The RSS experiment: Google Homepage
First off, I have to apologize for skipping last Friday; I thought readership might be low with the holiday, so I put off this installment a week. So, this is theoretically week #3 in the RSS experiment. Following up on last time, I decided to give Google Homepage (AKA Google personalized homepage) a chance. The lines between RSS readers and personalized homepages are blurring more and more as people seek one-stop sources for information, so I don't feel this experiment would be complete without including these broader tools.Google Homepage allows you to create a custom Google search page that incoporates a number of information modules (news, weather, sports, etc.). It also directly intergrates Google Reader and Gmail. Unfortunately, since this integration requires stuffing a lot of information into a tiny part of a larger page, some of these functions start to suffer a bit. Here's the breakdown:
Usability: 2/4 
This is a tough call, as you've really got three components: (1) ease of set-up, (2) ease of use of the page itself, and (3) ease of use of the RSS reader portion. Like most personalized homepages, Google Homepage takes a while to set up and customize, but, once you're done, it's often pretty usable, as it's been custom-created to match your preferences. Google Homepage's low usability marks come primarily from the Google Reader integration. Stuffing all of my RSS feeds into a tiny window of unread items just didn't cut it for me, and wasn't worth the tradeoff for the extra add-ons.
Features: 3/4 
Feature-wise, Google Homepage does have a lot more options than Google Reader, but this is, in part, the nature of the beast. As an RSS reader, it theoretically has all of the features of Google Reader, just one step away. So, I've got to give it credit for those features, but that extra click feels like a lot for a tool whose primary purpose is to quickly summarize a large amount information.
Google Homepage Recap
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I just found myself not using Google Homepage very much and longing to go back to Google Reader. For people who really value the news snippets, weather forecasts, etc., Google Homepage might be a good middle-ground, but for serious RSS users I'd have a hard time recommending it. The extra bells and whistles just couldn't make up for the inconvenience. Up next week, another personalized homepage: My Yahoo!
Sean
· Friday, April 13I use the Google Homepage (and googlepages) for most of my RSS needs. A lot of the items I monitor don't update often, so it works. If I monitored a faster paced source, I'd be lost using Google Homepage.
Dr. Pete
· Friday, April 13Sean, do you access those through Google Reader as a module or as individual content items on Google Homepage? I just realized I didn't really cover the second option. The biggest downside of that seems to be the same as My Yahoo and Firefox; there's no tracking of read/unread items.