Tell Me About Google Reader
Most everyone has heard about Google Reader at this point. But I am sure there are more people out there who don’t know an RSS feed from a banner ad, and how Google’s product leverages this technology.
First we need to discuss what RSS is. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The RSS feed format uses XML to define and standardize different fields in a data stream. This stream, or feed, can be interpreted by a RSS reader (also sometimes known as an aggregator) and presented to the end user in a clean, easy to navigate format. RSS feeds can contain text and URL links to media and pictures, or extra markup tags. The RSS specification allows for full-text or just snippets to be syndicated.
Almost all feed readers will manage multiple RSS feeds, keep track of what articles are read or unread, and will allow some sort of tagging and selecting articles as ‘favorites’. They usually will also present a view that shows articles from some or all subscribed feeds together sorted by date or other criteria to the user. This is sometimes called the ‘river of news’ view. Google Reader is one such RSS app with an additional trick up its sleeve — it is completely browser-based. It can also, however, be used off-line with a browser plug-in called Google Gears.
There are a number of other web-based feed readers out there, for example BlogLines. What makes Google Reader different? Well, it does a number of things differently:
- Every action in Google Reader can be done with a key-press. This comes in really handy (pun not intended) if you are the keyboard-accelerator type, or even if you have a lot of articles to catch up on. Once you have your RSS feeds set up, hit G for GO and A for ALL, and you will see your latest articles. Now it J to go to the next article, and K to go back. Each article is marked ‘read’ automatically. And if you want to be even lazier, you can use the space bar also! Pressing ? at any time will give you a pop-up overlay of important keys. You basically never have to use the mouse. By the way, this also applies to Google Mail.
- Every RSS feed available in Google Reader is cached on Google’s servers. You may not care how Google acquires the RSS feeds, but the advantage here is that you can search for RSS feeds using just the feed name, or a keyword that interests you, or whatever. Google stores and indexes each RSS feed that is added so it can be searched. That includes your personal “river of news”.. once you have it set up, you can search it for specific words or phrases.
- Google makes it easy to use embedded media. Google Reader supports a number of different types of blog feeds — if you have a favorite podcast or vidcast, add the RSS and Google will probably be able to play the files right inside the reader. If it can’t, hitting O will open the article on the original web site for you to view.
- Trend tracking is built-in. From the front page once you are logged in, you can now track statistics such has your busiest feed reading day of the week, how many articles you have read and how many you have shared or starred.
- There are new friend features. Added very recently, Google Reader now leverages its knowledge of your Google Chat contact list (with your consent) to add a list of your friends who also use Reader. By default, your friends’ shared articles are then visible in your feed and vice-versa. This is actually potentially a very powerful idea — You might spend a lot of time ‘separating the wheat from the chaff’ so to speak.. and it always feels good to know that others are reaping the benefits of your hard work. Sharing an article with friends is as easy as pressing shift-S to ‘share’, and then that article appears in your shared feed. Here is my Google Reader Shared Items List.
- The site is usually really fast. Even with hundreds of articles, Reader generally doesn’t slow down too much.
- Sending an article via email is really sweet. Ok, this may be more a personal opinion of mine, but when you use the option to email an article (the accelerator key is E), what shows up on the other side is a beautifully-formatted HTML email that preserves the native structure of the article. Email yourself and article and see!
You can use it offline. You might wonder how a web-based app can be used offline. Well, Google wrote a browser plug-in called Gears that interfaces with Reader to ‘cache’ the content so you can view it on the road. There are a couple of caveats with this — in the interest of saving time offline mode does not pull down images or video, but all the text and content are there for you to read and flag as you please. And once you are back online, those flags get synced back up to the server.
Overall, I would say Google Reader is a very impressive web-based RSS feed reader. 
It works with most browsers, easy to use, fast and responsive, has a developing social aspect and can be somewhat addictive. Adding new feeds is a breeze and you can either put in an absolute URL or just the name of a popular feed. Also, browsers such as Firefox and Flock now make adding feeds to Reader using the RSS link icon in the navigation bar a cinch. Check it out, you might find it is the perfect way for you to get caught up on all the news you are currently visiting 8 different web sites to get.