Last week, after three years of being a Newsgator fan and customer, I switched to Google Reader.
I started using Newsgator after they released their first product - an RSS newsreader Outlook plugin. It was a great product and I really liked that it was integrated with Outlook. Then I started to notice that anytime I would go to read news, I would read my work email, which wasn’t necessarily healthy (much like my Blackberry). So when Newsgator bought Feeddemon, I moved away from the Outlook plugin and onto the over to the standalone newsreader [1]. Feeddemon is a great product and along with the sister product, NetNewsWire for the Mac, I think Newsgator has a great portfolio of products. Best of all they all sync with their online newsreader so you can read news from anywhere and it all stays synchronized.
At first glance, the advantage to the Newgator setup is that you get the interactivity of a desktop application when reading news. But after years of use I realized that reading news is implicitly a browser based activity. This meant that FeedDemon suffered from having to integrate with the browser. So the user flow was broken up and there was no ability to easily move quickly through news with the keyboard. Additionally, when you wanted to drill into an article, you had to wait for Feeddemon to launch another browser window, which often took a lot of time. This wasn’t Feeddemon’s fault, just a fundamental issue with needing to integrate with IE.
So while this integration was frustrating, none of the online newsreaders had the interactivity of Feeddemon. Bloglines, one of the surprisingly popular web based newsreaders, is fundamentally flawed my mind (in addition to being horribly ugly). When you select a folder of feed in Bloglines, it marks all items in the folder as read. I read news in the five minutes between meetings or the three minutes Niko is quiet in the bouncy chair. Marking all items read just doesn’t work.
When Google Reader was first released, it wasn’t mature enough to get me to switch. But after the Reader team announced a major release a couple weeks ago I gave it another look. After using it for two weeks, I’m completely sold on the product. They allow you to easily group your your news feeds by tags and support keyboard shortcuts for almost every operation. Best of all, the keyboard shortcuts let you move between items and they are only marked read after you scroll through them.
There are two features I miss that the Google Reader doesn’t have yet. I like to read my news oldest to newest which it doesn’t support. I also really like the “news bins” feature in Feeddemon. This allows you to save news items to different bins to look at later. Reader supports “staring” but I want two markers. One I use to mark notable items and another I to mark items I should invest more time reading. Neither of these are important enough to me to keep me from switching.
The Google Reader team really nailed this release. They have achieved the interactivity of a desktop application while having all the advantages of a web app. The application is easy to use and has always been extremely responsive [2].
I also just switched to Google Calendar, but I’ll leave that for another post.
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[1] As a product guy, I found this move interesting. I feel like for the most part people want products that are as integrated as possible. Here was a situation where I explicitly did not want the product integrated. This is similar to the fact that I read the New York Times on dead trees despite the fact that it is available online. My brain needs at least 15 minutes a day where I’m not staring at my laptop. (Don’t tell my laptop, it might get jealous.)
[2] If you don’t use a newsreader, now is the time to give one a try. Google Reader is completely free. One great use of a newsreader that is often overlooked is to subscribe to a flickr photo stream. Each photo a flickr user adds shows up a news entry making it easy to keep up with your friend’s photos. To add a flickr user to Google Reader, use the “browse” feature next to “Add Subscriptions,” select flickr as the service and enter the flickr username (happyinwater for example).
Did you ever try bloglines? I’m curious about Google Reader, but switching newsreaders is scary, even if bloglines annoyances have been increasing lately.
I used Bloglines for a couple weeks and found it unworkable (see the 4th paragraph above). It also had a horrible look and feel which degraded the experience further. The nice thing is giving another feedreader a try is pretty simple. Because you can easily export your opml file from Bloglines and import it into Google Reader, making the jump only takes a couple clicks. Your feeds won’t be organized in the same way but that shouldn’t take long in Reader. Are there particular features you found key in Bloglines that you worry are not in Reader?
Oh, man, I think newsreaders have degraded my online reading comprehension. (Always blame technology for personal shortcomings.)
No particular worries about lack of features, only the general ease of browsing through things and saving things (esp. podcasts) for later. This whole marking-things-read-as-you-scroll is creepy, but I think I might like it.
I just wish there was a good way to handle secure feeds in online readers.
Anyways, looking forward to your thoughts on calendars.
Technology is totally responsible for all of my personal shortcomings. I would be out exercising right now if it weren’t for this damn laptop.
Reader actually does easy of browsing and tagging better than any reader I have seen so far. They key to it is the keyboard shortcuts. Important ones are “n” and “p” for next and previous news item, “v” for viewing the full post (opens a new window), and “t” to tag something. All of this can be done without moving your hands from the keyboard.
I always head back “Home” where they have the keyboard shortcuts documented to remind myself when I forget.
Sh#rpReader 4EVAR!!!!
It supports exactly the way I want to read the internet (organize the content chronologically but then let me see the original web page). It supports authentication for my SuperSekret blogs like Corp, and it has a manual refresh mode so that I can keep the floodgates closed if I don’t want to be distracted.
The browser integration is seamless for me because I ues IE6, and SharpReader’s browser module is IE. It’s fast and I can click “Open in new window” any time I want.
The only thing I’ve never mastered is being able to consume a feed in which I somehow don’t read every item— if I see articles, I must read them or else I feel like I’m a failure at Web Browsing. To defeat this issue the software would have to lie to me about what articles are available.
But as a result, the only feeds in my reader are ones that have such a good batting average that I’m willing to read every single article. As soon as I start to dread or yawn at some of one feed’s articles, I kill the whole feed. No more Jalopnik, no more BoingBoing. And I have more free time now, that I can spend over-analyzing things. Is that so bad?
(And you can take it as flattery that I still read your blog. :)
I am shocked that my blog didn’t get tossed out with the likes of Boing Boing (or even before).
SharpReader is so Web 1.0. As you know, Web 2.0 apps like Google Reader are just better because they use things like AJAX and “microformats.” Plus SharpReader only works on IE. What happens if you find yourself in Peru which has adopted Linux as a national standard? Then you would be in trouble. I think you have lost sight of the fact that it isn’t how _useful_ you find an application, it is how _cool_ others think you are when you use it.
Unfortunately I have learned that somewhat painful lesson from my current industry all too well.
[...] I’m still happily using Google Reader, after switching a couple months ago. Following the lead of Greg and Rus, here is my shared page and shared feed. I was also really easy to drop the “shared items” Reader widget into my blog sidebar, but if you are using an RSS reader to read this, you won’t notice. [...]