Steve Rubel has resolved to return to feed reading in 2011.
However, I have been using Google Reader since 2007 and use it daily to catch up with the tech and sports news in addition to my favourite blogs. I honestly can't imagine life without it. I was also interested by a recent article (prompted by the demise of delicio.us) that described the use of Google Reader as a bookmarking service.
I am a big fan of Netvibes but also follow the ongoing development of Google Reader with interest. Increasingly, I find myself tempted to convert to Reader permanently.
Here's a Flickr set of annotated screenshots to illustrate the functionality in Google Reader and the flexibility of the interface. I think the recent addition of subscriber counts to Google Reader will show that Reader has a substantial and rapidly growing share of the RSS reader market. Stowe Boyd and Tom Raftery are already noting a Feedburner spike as a result.
Interestingly, Darren Rowse notes that subscribers from Google Reader/Desktop/IG already heavily outnumber the established and popular Bloglines reader.
Looking forward, one feature I would really like to see in Google Reader is feed discovery and recommendations based on readers with common interests and similar reading lists.
Apart from the 'vi' shortcuts, I was slightly underwhelmed by Google Reader when it was released last year.
Imagine my surprise, when I just used Google Reader to quickly check that I had reinstated full text feeds for this blog. Unless I see it with my own eyes, I just don't believe it.
Google Reader launches with a modest splash screen with some exciting announcement (which I immediately skipped) and I was greeted by some unexpected and welcome changes to the interface.
All my feeds appear in a hierarchy grouped by 'label'. However, I must admit I am confused. They used to be 'labels'. Now it appears 'labels' are dead and my categories are 'folders' or 'tags' depending on the context.
Google has also added:
Even more strange is the fact I have happened upon something brand new all by myself.
Nothing on the blogs which I just scanned a minute ago. Nothing on Technorati. Nothing from Robert Scoble. Nothing on the RSS related blogs. No text message from the wife. Nothing on the Google blog. No IM from my son. Nothing on the Google Reader blog. Nothing on digg. Nothing on reddit. Nothing on del.ici.ous.
This is it. I am finally going be famous. My 15 minutes is here. I am going to be dugg and the WordPress servers will creak under the strain.
Apart from the fact it took me 7 minutes to compose these words, by which time this exciting Web 2.0 development will be yesterday's vinegar stained fish'n'chip paper.
When you turn to the light and start to fully embrace the River of News, the sickening realisation slowly dawns that you might actually have been mistaken and partial feeds may just have some redeeming features while full feeds are indeed the work of the devil.
Full feeds potentially interrupt the flow of the river. The title alone isn't enough to determine whether the article merits further consideration. Expanding the article should give you just enough to determine whether you want to read the full text.
This effect is spoiled by the lengthy verbosity of the full text feed for articles you are not interested in whatsoever.
The ideal compromise would be a 2 line precis of the article but Peter Scott is the only blogger in the universe who is thoughtful enough to do this.
I have an increasing tendency to skim all my RSS feeds in Netvibes just to finish reading them as quickly as possible and not really reading (or enjoying) the content.
My therapist recommended some diversion therapy; install the Gregarius aggregator locally on my PC, import my OPML and experiment with Dave Winer's controversial ' River of News' concept.
Now my previous experiments with Joomla and subsequently WordPress and Drupal have been made incredibly easy by Wamp (a packaged distribution of mySQL, PHP and Apache).
And so it proved again. A mere 7 minutes to get Gregarius working. A further 29 minutes to fail to work out why Netvibes has chosen to resurrect and export some dear, dead departed feeds (with Japanese writing) from beyond the grave.
Gregarius has the conventional two pane (feed-article) view and you can quickly review all articles from all blogs in reverse date order. You can then choose to expand any articles of particular interest.
Of course, for the full cascading river effect, I had to collapse the feeds and remove all tags, folders and categories to simply let all feeds flow as one raging torrent. There are no Oracle blogs anymore. You are all fighting for a place on the raft.
The default Gregarius theme is a little monochrome for my liking or maybe that is the default 'Newspaper' view (black and white and read all over) but there are other themes available to liven up the RSS experience.
So now I am no longer skimming my 81 feeds but blissfully wallowing in this river of news.
All of this excitement is almost enough to encourage me to investigate pricing (again) for hosted PHP/mySQL providers so I can read the same feeds from multiple computers.
Imagine trying to hold a conversation with someone who never completed their sentences. Irritating, eh ?
I used to smile when people like Robert Scoble (and other well respected bloggers) used to get all heated and uptight in a raging controversy about a subject as innocuous as the thorny issue of partial versus full RSS feeds.
I used to think 'Crikey. Aren't there more serious things in life to worry about ?' (football and music to name just two).
But now I agree that partial feeds are indeed the work of the devil. Partial feeds seem to defeat the whole point of RSS and I am growing to hate that tantalising '...'
I have configured Netvibes which looks excellent and is rapidly becoming my one stop home page, RSS reader, search engine, portal, email, calendar, calculator, everything.
Everything that is apart from being able to read blogs by people who insist on using partial RSS feeds.
People who insist on publishing partial feeds (step forward all you Oracle bloggers) are now forcing me to click another button in order to read their articles in all their glory.
Another click isn't the end of the world but please remember that I am very lazy. It is also a context switch into another application (browser) when Netvibes is perfectly able of displaying the content.
I can understand commercial sites using partial feeds as they rely on advertising revenue so they have an interest in pulling people to the actual site. However for personal bloggers just writing for fun, I don't see the point.
Well, actually, of course, I do see the point. Some personal bloggers are not just doing it purely for fun. They are doing it to see if what they are writing is actually of interest to anybody and whether anyone is watching.
That's why they publish partial feeds, forcing the interested reader along to the site and incrementing the precious stat counter by one.
When I recently plugged this blog into a statistics counter, I toyed with killing my Feedburner feed (WordPress has a perfectly good feed) and converting to a partial RSS feed. Both of these changes would force people to my site, increase my traffic and boost my ego.
However, I decided against because some people may prefer Feedburner (for whatever reason) and other readers may prefer to read my words from within their favoured RSS reader without that extra click.
So I decided not to risk antagonising my audience (of two) and to leave well alone.
I am using the Newsgator Online RSS reader and simply want to order my most important, must-read blogs (i.e mine) at the top. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable requirement. From a cursory glance at the documentation, it is not immediately clear if I can even do this in Newsgator. This is a little irritating as I now have to do some work to scroll down to 'Oracle' or rename the folder as 'AAAOracle'. And, yes, you're right, I am very lazy.
Then I stumbled across a blog article on SearchFox which is another Web based RSS reader (like Newsgator) but with an interesting personalisation and recommendation engine which automatically bubbles your favourite, most frequently read articles and blogs to the top of your reading list.
This sounds interesting. It is a pity that SearchFox is another Web 2.0 application that is in beta and currently open to a selected few who must apply for an account. Still, I sent them a polite email citing my recent review and asked for access to evaluate their product. I even used a Gmail address to prove my Web 2.0 credentials. I sent the email yesterday and am now polling my Google Inbox every ten seconds.
I stumbled across SearchFox on a arbitrary blog search on feedster about RSS and it struck me that, in the past, I would use Google (Web, Groups), TuCows, SourceForge, Freshmeat to find OpenSource, free RSS readers.
However most of these sources are relatively out of date and had failed to unearth SearchFox when I was recently looking for RSS readers. The fast moving blogosphere is much better suited to finding these sort of hip, new Web 2.0 applications.
Google have launched an online RSS Reader. Like most developments from Google, this looks very professional and fits in with their rapidly growing suite of software products. Although I currently use Thunderbird for reading (a very limited number of) RSS sources and blogs, the use of a Web based service to manage all my information sources, accessible from anywhere, is appealing.
I experimented by setting up one source (BBC News) and one thing about the interface immediately struck me like a thunderbolt !
The use of the 'j' and 'k' keys to move the article list up and down. It is just like the good old trusty (and much maligned) Unix editor 'vi'. Now this may appeal to Unix users but I am not sure whether the new generation of IE users will make of the 'oh but for touch typists, it is so much faster' argument.