Comments on: Web 2.0: Google Reader

By: stef

stef — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 12:57:12 +0000

i was looking for a tool like this, not knowing bloglines, newsgator or gregarious existed

one problem i have with GReader is that it seems to hang for ages when adding a feed from a technoratie or del.icio.us page. i have to try about 5-6 times before it accepts such a feed

so im off to try gregarious and newgator now

By: Adrian Lee

Adrian Lee — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 10:46:55 +0000

I really don’t like it. I follow about 75 feeds in Bloglines, I find it very easy to use and a good efficient way to scan over unread feed items.

Google’s reader on the other hand seems a hell of a lot slower. It seems to list individual items, rather then being able to read all items from one feed at a time. When I read Scoble I like to scan the general long list of unread items quickly to see if anything is particularly interesting to me. I don’t seem to be able to do that in Google Reader.

And what’s with the annoying use of that ‘next 20′ AJAX style scroll? Can’t I just have a scroll bar and use my mouse wheel? I’m not surprised people are making the same mistakes with JavaScript’s reinvention in AJAX as they made before, replacing perfectly good functionality with something that looks a bit flashing, but is actually more annoying to use. It’s one of the reason’s I’ve always been wary of JS, and now AJAX. If it’s used for new things, or to supprot existing things, fine, but when it replaces them and makes things slower, it bugs me.

Bloglines is SOOOOOOOOO much easier and faster to use for following my long list of feeds. Google are either aiming it at a different market, or have completely missed the point.

By: nofollow breaks blogs

nofollow breaks blogs — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 19:33:31 +0000

I really didn’t like the options I was given when searching for various phrases. For instance, searching for specific news terms brings up MSM stories about that, but the feeds are not specific to those words, they’re main or one-level-down feeds, like searching for Bush brings up a US news feed or a politics feed.

With technorati I also get a snippet and an idea of the blog’s supposed “authority”, aka link popularity.

They should also move the scroll links next to one another.

And, of course, this is also a great new thing for google to get into and watch over.

By: Janine

Janine — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 16:45:57 +0000

sorry I probably should ask this question somewhere else but, there are a lot of smart people here and I’m sure one of you could answer this….does the Google Reader have anything like the Bloglines Notifier? This is one of the main resons that I like Bloglines and wouldn’t see a need to make the switch to Google Reader if it lacks a notifier. (?)

By: Havagan

Havagan — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 15:04:08 +0000

I’ll have to stick with Bloglines as well. Although the UI works fine for me in Firefox it didn’t want to ingest my Bloglines exported OPML file and hung on import after 7 feeds… which meant deleting them, (and after reading another blog saying Google Reader didn’t like grouped feeds) editing the OPML file to remove my Bloglines groups and then manually “labeling” almost 100 feeds.

I can deal with the headaches involved with switching services but I have some simple requests in my feed readers that Google Reader doesn’t have… as mentioned by Fourputtinski a “Delete All” button and even more important to me a “Mark All Read” function. Some days I just don’t feel like clicking on every single item in my scrolling item pane.

Speed of download issues also seem to be a problem right now — presumably because of everyone on there testing the new services. It will take a few days to see how quickly Google Reader updates the feeds which is one issue I do have with Bloglines (which often has up to a day delay before new items appear).

Paul

By: Fourputtinski

Fourputtinski — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 14:02:27 +0000

I imported an OPML file and I do not like the way it came out.

I have over 100+ feeds.

To delete them and start over I have to *manually* delete each one by hand.

Geez o’ petes.

I’ll stick to Bloglines for now.

By: Dimitar Vesselinov

Dimitar Vesselinov — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 01:31:35 +0000

I think Google needs more QA (quality assurance) engineers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance

By: Nathan Lanier

Nathan Lanier — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 23:56:17 +0000

The flash (I think it’s flash?) mp3 player for audio feeds is outstanding.

By: Carson Fire

Carson Fire — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 21:40:56 +0000

Hmm… flashier than my beloved Bloglines, but as Stephen says it doesn’t function well. Did they test this on more than one platform/browser?

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 19:34:42 +0000

And it doesn’t work. I wish Google would hold back a little before releasing products.

Is Google Talk on par with Skype? Does Blog Search compete with Technorati? Is Google Reader as good as Newsgator? “No” on all three counts.