resisting the lure of Google Reader
I am a big fan of Netvibes but also follow the ongoing development of Google Reader with interest. Increasingly, I find myself tempted to convert to Reader permanently.
- Speed - Google Reader has a set of keyboard shortcuts that make scanning a large number of feeds quick. Really quick. While Netvibes also offers keyboard shortcuts, out of habit, I tend to use mouse-clicks to navigate between tabs and articles.
- Flexibility - You can read related blogs that are grouped together (e.g. Oracle, Wordpress), read an individual blog or quickly skim over a river of news.
- Sharing - Occasionally, I want to save an article for future reference or potentially sharing with others. These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information quickly noted in passing which I wouldn't necessarily blog about. The most obvious place to mark these items is right here in the RSS reader as opposed to a static bookmark. The list should (obviously) be visible as an RSS feed. Google's shared and starred items make this easy (single keystroke).
- Flexible interface - I really like the full screen mode and the options for 'list view' where articles are condensed apart from the current article and 'expanded view' (all articles are expanded).
- Statistics - I can't decide whether the trends page about your personal reading habits may actually be useful or just a gimmick.
Here's a Flickr set of annotated screenshots to illustrate the functionality in Google Reader and the flexibility of the interface.
I think the recent addition of subscriber counts to Google Reader will show that Reader has a substantial and rapidly growing share of the RSS reader market. Stowe Boyd and Tom Raftery are already noting a Feedburner spike as a result.
Interestingly, Darren Rowse notes that subscribers from Google Reader/Desktop/IG already heavily outnumber the established and popular Bloglines reader.
Looking forward, one feature I would really like to see in Google Reader is feed discovery and recommendations based on readers with common interests and similar reading lists.
the only search engine in town
John Chow notes the vast majority of traffic to his blog from search engines comes from Google. I see a similar pattern for this humble blog with over 95% of search engine traffic arriving from Google despite the fact that the blog has been indexed by the major players.
Although I use Firefox (where the default search engine is Google) and I hardly ever use any other search engine, I was surprised that the number of visitors from Yahoo was a paltry 2%. I also thought more people using Internet Explorer would get directed from MSN/Live as the breakdown of browsers visiting this blog is split evenly between Firefox and Internet Explorer.
As for ask.com, I mistakenly thought this search engine ceased to exist when they recently killed off the English butler Jeeves. I actually had to go and check the logs to see whether the Ask crawler had even indexed the pages.
things that surprise you
I am slowly trying to fully assimilate and comprehend these facts:- Google is now worth more then IBM
- IBM invest a lot of resources in SecondLife while I am still resistant to IM.
- Manchester United placed posters of Liverpool's past successes in the visitors section at Old Trafford. Rumour has it the pictures were only black and white but were still stolen after Liverpool's recent 2-0 defeat.
custom Oracle search engine
Google Co-op is a customisable Google search engine and I just created a personalised, custom search for Oracle that scours AskTom, Jonathan Lewis' site and www.oracle.com (including TechNet). This targetted search is useful and will undoubtedly save me time. However, I was unable to get any results from 'tahiti.oracle.com' (Oracle documentation set) which is normally my first port of call. Also, I assume Metalink is similarly off limits (account required).Google Docs and Spreadsheets
Google have announced 'Docs & Spreadsheets' which is an overhaul of the original Writely interface and integration with Google Spreadsheets. I must admit I prefer the Google Docs interface and was interested to see that Docs can still publish to a blog (just like Writely).
The documentation suggests that tagging the article with keywords will be mapped to matching blog categories and that the document title will indeed be preserved in the blog entry. However, a simple test confirms that neither of these two features work as advertised (on WordPress at least). Sigh.