With my come back to GMail, I’m also trying other Google tools, because it’s all about integration. One of the tools that I’ve tried before, but didn’t like is Google Reader, Google’s RSS aggregator.
I was pleased to find out that a lot of changes were made to Google Reader since my last encounter with it. The interface is way more intuitive. Things are working out faster. And there are bits hard to ignore, like built-in multimedia support (images, podcasts, video, etc), tagging (although named labeling), sharing, and GMail integration.
For the slow ones, there’s an excellent screencast that explains most of the Google Reader functions in an easy and obvious way. The screencast is a bit outdated, but it doesn’ matter much, because the pricnples are still the same, just the interface is a bit cleaner.
I’ll try to use Google Reader for the next few days and see if it will stick…
IMHO bloglines interface is a lot cleaner and much more user-friendly. the left-side panel with list of subscribtions, which I can view separately is something google definetly misses.
there definetly are significant improvements and hopefully they will actually make it usable one day.
First of all, in Google Reader click on Subscribtions – you’ll see the full list of all your feeds. You can select any one of them to view separately.
User-friendlyness of Bloglines depends very much on the number of feeds you have and your ways of working with them.
What I like about Google Reader (except for tags, of course) is that it groups related messages from different feeds together. And, of course, reading old messages is way easier and more intuitive in Google Reader.