Google announced Google Reader updates today. With these updates, I think Reader is finally a truly useful contender as a web based feed reader. I’ve looked at it in the past and been pretty underwhelmed, but I’m pretty impressed with what I’ve seen so far tonight. This has potential to take on the big boys.
We now have unread counts, ability to organize feeds into folders (which worked wonderfully when I imported my OPML file) and, finally, a “mark all read” option. An interesting sharing feature too. It seems I can tag a post as “shared” and folks can see those at my public link. Might be useful, might not. I haven’t thought it through yet. The obligatory “river of news” is present too. Oh, and this is really cool: If viewing posts in the “Expanded View”, as you scroll through them they automagically get marked off as read. Little touches like that are just nice to see.
What do I like, right off the bat? Even after a post is marked read, it’s still in the list. I don’t have to go chasing after it like I do with BlogLines (my usual web based reader). The keyboard navigation works well too. It has the usual spartan Google look to it, but everything seems laid out logically and while a bit plain, it works well.
Since it’s so easy to export/import OPML, I’m going to switch to this one for a few days/weeks and see how I like it in the longer run. At first glance, I sure like it. I have to remember to try this from the Pocket PC and see how it looks there.
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September 28th, 2006 
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