Google Reader Update
I think I was a bit hasty with my initial comments regarding Google Reader.
I’ve been using it a lot the past few days and unfortunately it does have some niggles..
I’ve made a quick list of pros and cons which I’ve found.
Pros:
- Quickly loads RSS article text when switching between visible RSS items
- Star items for future reference
- No frames, neater and better looking
Cons:
- Can’t easily select different RSS sources to read items from, have to open “your subscriptions” and even then it’s not as useful as it could be
- Doesn’t order by date properly, seems buggy
- Sometimes slow updating the list (i.e. loading a new list when you navigate a page down)
- I’ve read some articles multiple times.. never had this with Bloglines
- Sort by relevance – relevant to what?
I think I’ll stick with it for a while as it’s still Beta and see if they fix any of these issues
Update:
It seems the ‘articles appear multiple times’ was in fact an RSS feed problem rather than a Google Reader problem..
With further testing I have encountered a few more issues:
- Slow performance at times which causes the AJAX interface to behave very strangely
- Very difficult to manage lots of feeds (currently I have around ~140)..
- Cannot assign multiple feeds the same label in one step
- Cannot erase a complete label group (I know there would be conflicts with multiple labels but could be worked around)
- Importing isn’t great (see below)
- I’m seeing very old articles on some feeds even though I haven’t clicked the ‘show older articles’
I had around 40 feeds tagged with ’9rules-network’ and decided I wanted to delete this label group and reimport it using the latest 9rules OPML file.
Unfortunately I had to delete them one by one, then when I reimported (which took a loooong time for some reason – didn’t first time), half of the imported feeds had the old label again which had been completely erased earlier!
You must remember however that it is a Beta version and hopefully the Google Reader team will persivere and make the reader into something special.
Many thanks to Mihai Parparita from the team for e-mailing me regarding the issues I was having.