Google Reader finally gets an update
I’ve been a long time user of bloglines but I’m always keen on trying new RSS readers in hopes that there will be something better. I had tried Google Reader when it first came out but was quite disappointed with it. Today Google released a complete redesign of their web based reader and my oh my, it seems wonderful so far. They even released a video (following Robert Scoble’s advice I assume) showing it off. Here are some of their new features:
Shared Items
On any item you can click the “share” link at the bottom of the item and it will add it to your shared items. What happens with your shared items? Well you share them of course. Clicking on “Shared Items” in the top left will display a page that shows all your shared items, the public page that they are available on, a RSS feed people can subscribe to, and javascript code you can add to your website to show your new shared items. Wow! My shared page is located here and you can subscribe to my shared item feed here.
Starred Items
Just like the shared items except these are just for you, private items. I like starring items in gmail and google groups so this works out well in feeds as well. By starring an item I can defer reading it until later.
Tags
I really wish bloglines would have added this a long time ago. Ever since I started using del.icio.us it makes so much sense to assign multiple tags to items. It worked out so well for bookmarks and it carries over very well to feeds as well. I haven’t come up with a perfect tagging mechanism yet so right not I’m very liberal with my tags. Google reader makes it very easy to manage all your tags and read items only tagged with specific names.
Keyboard Shortcuts
They nailed this one too. When I tried Rojo I was pretty excited to have tags for my feeds. I only tried rojo for a day before being appalled that it had no keyboard shortcuts (and it was always slow for me too). The google reader has an awesome set of keyboard shortcuts. Of course the ‘j’ and ‘k’ to select items (just click bloglines) and ‘v’ opens the item’s URL in a new window (I wish it was ‘o’ as I’m used to that with bloglines). They have navigation controls to jump around to home (‘g’ then ‘h’), all items (‘g’ then ‘a’), starred items (‘g’ then ‘s’), and two other ones that have some really cool javascript going on. If you press ‘g’ then ‘t’ a “popup” appears that shows all your tags, simply start typing and it filters the list and then press enter to open all the feeds for that tag. You can also open a specific feed this way by pressing ‘g’ then ‘u’. I’m very impressed!
Renaming Feeds
Why can’t I rename feeds in other services? No offense but I really hate when people have their blog named by some stupid tagline like “Technical excellence flows like a river”. Whenever I see a new item on one of these feeds I have no idea who or what it belongs to. I always wanted to name my feeds by who actually makes the posts. In my case I have “Jeffrey Vanneste’s Technical Blog”. A small feature added that made me very happy.
Other Stuff
They added a bunch of other features that are already done by lots of other readers so they aren’t really worth explaining (expanded and list views, mark all as read, unread counts, etc). There are already lots of posts popping up with positive notes about google’s new RSS reader (here, here, and here) but none from what I can see have mentioned the mobile version! You can access your feeds on your mobile device by going to the URL: http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/ . Bloglines has an great mobile version that works on my Pocket PC so I’m glad I will still be able to use my Pocket PC with Google Reader. If I had a decent cell phone I’d even be able to read my feeds on there.
Kudos to Google for releasing another top notch product. I’ll just pretend this is their first release of it.