Google Reader

Over the last week I've been playing with the latest Google product: Google Reader. Basically this is an RSS Aggregator that pulls feeds from blogs that you subscribe too so that you can read new postings without having to go and manually visit all those blog sights.

I've been reading some blogs for quite a while. Lately I've been following some of them more and more as I get a little more personally into this whole idea. The concept of anyone being able to publish thoughts to the entire planet is really pretty amazing. I actually get a lot of my information now from the web, and a lot of that is from RSS feeds that show up on my homepage of either My Yahoo or now Google Homepage.

Google Reader is apparently built on the new software called AJAX. I won't get into a great deal about what this involves here but it appears to be a new way of programming web sites for the future. It allows a great deal of flexibility for the programmer and the user alike.

The reader itself took me a few minutes to get use to using. Since it's still a Beta release from Google Labs there isn't a great deal of help information for it. But after a few minutes of experimenting I was able to figure it out and so far it's been working great. I'm assuming that when it's fully released it will be cleaned up a bit more to make the initial user experience a bit easier. Most likely anyone using an aggregator is a bit higher up on the computer savy end and will be able to figure it out like I did.

With the reader you are able to "star" entries like you can with Gmail so that you can go back and look at them again later. I would LOVE to see something like the "label" feature from Gmail so that I could save items related to different things. I'm assuming that the "filter" item is designed to help with that, but I honestly haven't tried using that too much yet.

Another cool feature is the easy ability to email an entry out via Gmail or to blog about an entry right from the entry itself. So far this has worked pretty well in my basic experiments. Perhaps you'll see some more entries now from me on small stuff I find on the web.

So all in all I would recommend this product. Yet again Google seems to be on the edge of the curve for leading the web.

-Kent