Although I have been using feed readers for ages (rather than the blogrolling links featured along the side of my site), I hadn’t heard of or made use of Google Reader, so it actually fell to Kate to forge the way into this new bit of lovely geek-toy-ery.
I love it. It’s not a perfect reader by any stretch, but as there isn’t actually a perfect news reader out there, that’s not as big a problem as it might seem at first glance. One of the major benefits Google Reader has over its competitors is that (like GMail, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheet, and the forthcoming Google-Everything-You-Will-Ever-Need) is that it is accessible anywhere you can access “The Internet.” This is of great benefit to me, as I will routinely use four five different ‘personal’ computers to ‘do stuff’ in the course of any given month, so the less that I have to reinstall and try perfectly replicate my preferred tools on those five different machines, the happier I am. FeedDemon, which is what I’ve been using, is a fantastic tool, but it’s also one of the programs that I MOST dread installing on a new machine, due to the fact that then need to reload all the different web pages I want it to watch.
NO MORE! I had Google reader import my FeedDemon settings this morning and new the deep, heartfelt satisfaction that comes from being really really lazy and, at the same time, knowing I had just added a significant task to the list of Stuff I Don’t Have to Do Again.
Thus: Happy.
One Reply to “Feed Google the World”
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I’ve pondered this, and even played with it a little bit. The main thing that keeps me with Jaeger is that the latter will do non-RSS “feeds” (e.g., “Look at the page and report back changed links on it”) if need be. Which, for some sites, is the only way to deal with them.
If everyone did RSS of some sort or another, Google Reader would be the way I’d go.