Review: Google Reader

I've recently moved away from a combination of FeedDemon (at work) and NetNewsWire (at home) to Google Reader for all my RSS reading.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the result and it makes it a lot easier to read feeds at work on my PC and not have to worry about syncing read items with my Mac at home through NewsGator.

With Google Reader, as it's all online, I get the same view wherever I am, even on my mobile. It works a treat in Safari as well (faster than in Firefox in fact).

The basic functions of any RSS reader are there: the ability to show expanded or list views, OPML file import/export, the ability to display only unread items etc. There are also a few other really handy features, like the ability to 'star', 'share' or 'tag' interesting items you come across in your feeds.

Starring works in much the same way as in gmail and is effectively a way of bookmarking an item so you can easily find it later on. I find it useful to star items that I want to blog about later so I can quickly refer back to them.

The sharing facility is a great idea, it enables you to create your own list of selected items from those that you are reading. People can then either look at a page of your shared items or subscribe to a feed so they can see what interesting items you deem worthy of sharing. You can see this in action by looking at the 'What we're reading' section on the right hand side of this blog.

You can also tag items that interest you, a more versatile form of starring, so that you can easily file or categorise items with any tag description. The tagging can also be used in combination with sharing to make public all items with a specific tag.

So the basics work well and there are some nice more advanced features. So far so good. But there are definitely some strange omissions as well (yes, before you say it, I know it's only a Google labs app).

Probably the most obvious is the lack of any kind of search tool. And this is from Google, the search king? Very strange. I would definitely like to be able to search through my subscriptions to find items I have already read but forgot to tag or star first time round.

Similarly, I'd like to be able to run permanent searches against my feeds. So if, for example, I always wanted to see a list of items in my feeds that contained the word 'apple' I could see them in a permanent list. In much the same way that you can search Google News and create feeds and email alerts from the results.

It would be nice to integrate this with your tags, so you could see items you had previously tagged with certain descriptions and then choose to display all items across all feeds that also contained that tag keyword or phrase. It would then start to become seriously powerful.

The other main thing I miss from the desktop apps (particularly NetNewsWire) are the powerful keyboard shortcuts. I used to navigate around my feeds a lot using the arrow keys for moving between and up/down the list of feeds and items.

In Google Reader you can use some keyboard shortcuts but it's not anywhere near as easy as with a desktop app due to the limitations of sitting inside a browser. I'd love to just be able to use the arrow keys, enter and space rather than shift+n/p or shift+o. It'd also be nice when spacing through unread items if when you got to the last item in one feed, it would take you to the first unread item of the next feed on pressing space again.

Mostly though, with the exception of search, these are smallish gripes. I'm happy now I have one RSS reader that I can access from any computer or mobile device with access to the internet. And I do like the now very familiar Google UI, it's clean, simple and does everything it needs to.

One final cool feature to mention is the 'trends' that have been implemented to track how many items you read, from which feeds, how often they publish etc. In the last 2 weeks (since I started using it) I've got these stats:

From your 61 subscriptions, over the last [2 weeks] you read 1,660 items, starred 38 items, and shared 22 items.

I can definitely recommend Google Reader, I won't be going back to a desktop app now. There are no doubt many more improvements planned so it can only get better. But if you can't live without searching then hold off for now and keep an eye on the Official Google Reader Blog to see when it's implemented but I'm sure that won't be too long.