Google has released a new version of Google Reader that’s worth checking out. It sports an interface that should be easy to get a hang of if you’re already used to Gmail. Interestingly, Google makes no mention of RSS anywhere on their site, even though the job of Google Reader is to let you read RSS feeds. This isn’t a bad call on their part. RSS is a tricky technology to explain to non-techies, and “Your inbox for the web” is a nice analogy.
My number one RSS reader of choice remains NetNewsWire, but my need to be able to read feeds on any of few computers makes it inconvenient. I had been using NewsGator Online, which provided very nice syncing with NetNewsWire, but I hate the interface, I don’t like the typography of the feed text, and all the buttons below each entry are too busy. (Also, let me mention how much I don’t like FeedBurner’s FeedFlare feature that seems to be gaining popularity. If I wanted to email your entry, I’d copy and paste it into my email program. I don’t need a button to do that, and having all those links at the bottom of every entry makes everything too busy.)
Google Reader looks nice and presents all the text with the same clean look as the rest of Google’s growing suite of applications.
My new, revised recommendation for people who want to start reading RSS feeds:
- For Mac users who are only going to subscribe to a few sites: Safari’s built in RSS reader is great.
- For everyone else: Google Reader.
- For Mac users who are going to subscribe to more than 20 or so sites, and who don’t have a need to be able to read their feeds on multiple computers: NetNewsWire.