Google’s Reader Unfortunately Sucks

I was afraid to be the first person to publicly bag on the Google Reader (Google’s newly released beta RSS feed aggregator). But now that Ed Bott has nailed it so accurately, I don’t feel so bad spouting my opinion.

Firstly, I don’t like the reading paradigm they’re using. I used to go for it – I call it the “one post at a time (like email)” RSS paradigm, but now I find it really inefficient for scanning. They make it fast, since they pre-load the next post so you can burn through them quickly, but there are some other things I don’t like about the interface. It’s important to me to know how many outstanding (yet to be read) items there are on a per-channel basis. If I have relatively few items per channel, I might want to read them all in one fell swoop by clicking the channel group rather than a channel name. The two most popular online aggregators (Bloglines and Newsgator Online) do this, as does FeedDemon, and presumably most other aggregators.

There are some other very prominent features missing, like the ability to perform bulk actions. For example, I imported the wrong OPML file, and now I want to purge all my feeds and start from scratch. The only way I’ve found to do that is to manually unsubscribe from each feed (150 of them!), which takes a good 20 seconds minimum per feed. Ack. That just sucks. And I’m probably going to have to do it at some point, since it’s linked to my google ID and therefore my Gmail account, and at some point I’m sure my feeds will show up in other Google properties.

It’s definitely Beta – but by Google standards more Alpha.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 at . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Google’s Reader Unfortunately Sucks”

  • Chris Meller Says:
    October 12th, 2005 at

    I posted this over on the FeedLounge forums, shortly after Google released the Reader:

    The Google Reader looks like a half-assed attempt at an RSS reader, if you ask me. I really dislike the way they handle feeds in particular.

    For the casual RSS user who has under a dozen feeds in their reader, all of which they want to read all the time, this is no doubt a great way to go about it. Unfortunately, for those of us who have entered the triple digits, there’s a lot of information we just can’t read all the time as soon as it comes available. I have to prioritize data, and it’s impossible to do so in their “first come, first serve” reading model.

    FeedLounge definitely kicks Google’s ass, even if not everyone can use it… yet. Just be patient, and I’m sure you’ll be amazed once FL is released to a wider audience!

    </shameless-advertising>

    The one good thing that’s come from this release is a sudden realization by people that just because it’s got a pretty Google logo on it, doesn’t mean it’s the best thing since sliced bread. I’m so sick of everything with their logo attached instantly being earth-shattering news.

    Talk was the last release, and what was so revolutionary about that? It’s Jabber! I could setup a “Talk” (read: Jabber) server and slap a pretty little logo on a client, but because Google did it, everyone was wetting themselves.

    It’s time to wake up and realize that gold plated s*** is still just as bad as the original…

    Too harsh?

  • Jason Says:
    October 15th, 2005 at

    Maybe a little harsh, but everyone’s entitled to their opinion. I’ll give FeedLounge a look though. Thanks!