Josh Russell

I took a second look at Google Reader at the beginning of this week. I’ve always wanted to use a RSS “News Reader” of some sort but never have for one main reason: the good ones aren’t web based, they’re stand-alone installed apps or browser plugins.

So because all my RSS would be being aggregated in one place I’ve always been put off, I’ve spent a long time putting my life online, and to be restricted in this didn’t make sense to me.

When Google Reader appeared a while back as always I tried it out, I’m an early adopter and I like to play with Betas, for fun and sometimes to learn from them. It’s like a tiny window on the future.. But I was disappointed with this initial offering. It was clunky and bloated, didn’t have the freedoms I wanted and it wasn’t always clear what you were reading. I did start using it, but not for long, it just didn’t occur to me to check it. I usually browse by having lots of tabs saved in a set with Sessionsaver which i periodically refresh. Well every 5 minutes or so all day!

Having all these tabs open meant I just forgot to check the reader. However, I had Sage installed as a plugin for Firefox, so I decided I’d take the convenient aggregated feed that the Google Reader offers of all the feeds you’ve loaded and load that into there. So I had all my feeds online (when I remembered to check it) and it was a very simple matter of just loading one feed into any desktop app i happened to have, wherever I was.

Convenient right? Well actually this didn’t work out either. It must have been a light Obsessive Disorder that took hold of me because I hated the fact that the items in my Google Reader weren’t being marked as read. Which bugged me! On top of that, again it was hard to tell when using this feed of feeds in Sage which articles were coming from where. Very frustrating.

So now I have a shiny new Google Reader to play with. All the same feeds are in there, and I’ve added a few more. I might remove Digg because it usually accounts for at least 3 quarters of the items in there and has the effect of diluting the rest. But that’s another article.. Aside from that I’m finding it a much more pleasurable experience, like the man says, it feels like an inbox for the web. And actually it looks like one too. I guess it just needs the spam and I’d feel right at home!

So my browsing patterns have changed. Now I wake up in the morning and refresh the reader (with “all items” selected) on my laptop before my journey to London. It has a great feature that loads more items as you get to the bottom of the page. It’s a never ending scroll, it doesn’t end! Which is good and bad. It means I never lose anything, but it also means that if left for a few days it becomes a giant list of things I don’t know yet. Which again brings on the Obsessive Disorder, I have to read it all, and it doesn’t end!

The other side effect is that I now end up with a LOT of tabs open to things I need to investigate or read in more detail. This is ok if I have some time or if I can read them there and then, but being on the train with a flaky-at-best internet connection, this often means I end up with a bunch of empty tabs. These I then refresh when I arrive at my destination and immediately I’m overwhelmed with information.

So is this a better way of browsing? It feels like it, but it has pitfalls. Added to the ones I describe is the lack of traditional browsing, hopping from one site to another. Have I created my own walled garden?