Google Reader – I’ve Been Assimilated

Pardon the Star Trek saying. 🙂

About two weeks ago I decided to try Google Reader after a blog post from my friend Peter. The results are in – I love it! It’s much easier to manage and organise and I love the trends. It has a few things I don’t like but nothing so dramatic that I’d go back to Bloglines.

Funnily enough since then my husband has finally decided to get with the program and subscribe to some blogs. I’d always recommended Bloglines and that’s what he went with. I showed him Google Reader but I suspect it was a little too much. Bloglines is a great way to start with RSS and feeds etc. I’d say something like Google Reader is more for advanced users. Although I don’t think I’ll tell him that. 😉

4 thoughts on “Google Reader – I’ve Been Assimilated”

  1. Sophie, Sophie, Sophie, don’t go doing this to me!
    I’ve been a very happy user of Bloglines for some time now, tried a few other aggregators, but none of them have ever compared to Bloglines. Now you go and tell me, from your own personal experience, that the new(er) Google Reader is better. Hmph, well now you’re going to force me to give it a proper go…..

  2. Hehe Adrian. I felt the same way when I read Peter’s post. But I’m glad I tried it. The beauty is because you can import your Bloglines feeds it’s easy to give Google Reader a go. And if you don’t like it it’s easy to go back to Bloglines.

    Let me know how you find it. 🙂

  3. Hmm, well it lasted all of a couple of hours, heh.

    Couple of things mainly, when using the mouse wheel to scrool down posts in a feed, it kept affecting the entire page, instead of just the scrollable area where the posts are listed. I can easily enough scroll the page up again, but it’s just annoying. And I always find it SOOOOOOOO frustrating going back to mice that don’t have scroll wheels or machines where ti doesn’t work, and having to use the scrollbars.

    The other thing, I have lots of feeds, some of them update quite often (Some stuff like Digg, Reddit, Search Engine Land!), and Google Reader seems to require you to ether click each individual post to mark it as read, or, click a ‘mark all as read’ link.
    In Bloglines the action is the other way around. You click something to keep them unread. Usually I’m not coming back to a blog post, so it makes sense that the extra required action is keep a post ‘active’, rather than marking 99% of posts as read.

    I possibly could get used to those differences in Google Reader, but I honestly see no reason to at the moment. Bloglines does what I want it to do, in a clear and easy to use manner. Sure, managing of feeds isn’t terribly slick in Bloglines, but it’s not all that often I’m adding/removing/moving feeds these days.

  4. Well at least you gave it a go. I agree with the mark as read – that’s the one thing that frustrates me – but I’m used to it now. I guess we should appreciate that we’ve so much choice. 🙂

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