The RSS experiment: Google Reader
It's week #2 in the RSS experiment and this week's feature is Google Reader. This was the first really difficult week. On Monday, I had to stop using Firefox, transfer all of my feeds to Google Reader, and use it (and only it) for the entire week. I'm currently only actively reading about two-dozen feeds, but I'm highly dependent on those feeds, so making the switch wasn't easy. Doing it every week for the next month or two is definitely going to be a challenge.Google Reader is about as pure an RSS reader as there is, as it's built specifically for feeds and has no personal home-page elements. Whether that's a good thing or not is in the eye of the beholder, but here's the breakdown from my perspective:
Usability: 3/4 
Google Reader is definitely clean and easy to navigate, and is well supported by the feed subscription tools. I was a bit bothered that you can't control the order or priority of your feeds. Once they're added to the main list, they go in alphabetical order, and that's that. Google Reader does, however, have a single panel that lets you view summaries of all unread items, and I got used to using that more than my feed list.
Features: 2/4 
Like most of the feed readers, Google Reader allows you to track what you've read, which is a key feature missing in Firefox. Google also displays the number of unread messages in the page title, like GMail, so it's easy to keep open and reference in a stand-alone browser window or tab. Functionally, Google Reader is solid, but doesn't go much beyond being an RSS tool. Maybe that's an unfair evaluation, as I'm theoretically supposed to be reviewing RSS tools, but my limited experience with some of the other, newer tools, suggests that many of them have wider feature sets.
Google Reader Recap
Overall, I liked Google Reader, and I even got used to using the unread entries window instead of referencing my list directly, but I'm holding out for something with a few more features. To be fair to Google, I've decided to make next week's subject Google Homepage, which integrates Google Reader and adds more personalization features.
Dr. Pete
· Monday, April 2Interesting, Mike; I didn't let it build up enough this week to notice that. I can see how the all-in-one new entry list could get cumbersome after a dozen or so posts build up. I found the main list on the left difficult to use, so I relied almost entirely on that unread post pane.
Mike Maddaloni
· Monday, April 2One feature of Google Reader I don't like Peter is the overall count of the number of feeds - it is only accurate to 99, otherwise it says 100+. Normally that is not an issue, but after taking a long weekend and not reading any blogs, it would be nice to see how many posts there are.
What - Google can't count? :)
mp/m