Fellow SiliconANGLE contributor Robert Scoble put out a post on one of his blogs today detailing why he doesn’t use Google Reader anymore.

There hasn’t been much response yet, but as an avid user of Google Reader, an already underappreciated tool for gathering large amounts of data and consuming it efficiently, I thought it necessary to enumerate the reasons why you shouldn’t base a decision to leave the app on Robert’s experience.

Incidentally, I found Robert’s post in Google Reader before I saw it anywhere else.

Robert thinks that the new list functionality from Twitter is going to make obsolete his need for Reader.  That may be the case.  I don’t have access to the new list functionality, but I pretty well understand how it works, and Robert is a special case.  Robert is one of the only people I’ve met in my lifetime that can claim to have read 10,000 blog posts in a single day (I can’t find the link substantiating that claim, but I distinctly remember interacting with Scoble on Twitter back in 2007-ish, when he was still high on Reader).

That, though, is my very point.  Robert Scoble reads an inordinately high amount of information on a daily basis.  In other words… I know Robert Scoble, and you, my friend, are no Robert Scoble.

You, unlike Robert Scoble, probably have things to do aside from keeping abreast of every last relevant news post for every aspect of technology.

Scoble’s List of Strikes Against Reader (and My Rebuttals).

So the problems he has with Reader aren’t your problems:

1) . Google Reader is FREAKING SLOW. It sometimes takes longer than a minute to open it up. "But my Google Reader account is super fast," I can hear you saying. Yeah, but you don't have any friends and you don't have many things you are subscribed to. Compare to Twitter lists or Twitter itself. I'm following 10,000+ people. More than 100,000 are following me. Yet Twitter opens instantly.

You probably don’t have this problem.  Google Reader will, then, be fast for you.

2. Google Reader's UI is too confusing. Yeah, I know how to use it, but really, do we need "like" and "share" and "share with note?"

Google’s UI is the simplest I’ve seen in a web app.  I can operate the whole website without hardly leaving my homerow on the keyboard.  J, K, L and <Shift+D>.  That’s pretty much it. Robert’s reaching on this one – because this is the same set of features he pitched as Google Reader’s strength when he was enamoured with it.

3. It makes me feel guilty. I have 1,000 unread items. Twitter doesn't tell me that.

Create tags and lists. Admittedly, I hated that Friendfeed and Facebook required me to create groups and tags to interact with it meaningfully, but that’s because those sites, at least to me, were seen as primarily recreational. I shouldn’t have to work to enjoy myself on your site.

Reader, on the other hand, is a tool.  And it’s easy to create categories and groups. 

When I started with Mashable, one of the first things Pete did was hand me an OPML file with 2,000 feeds in it, unsorted. When I imported it into Reader, I spent about three hours sorting the feeds into something usable, and by and large, I use the same sorting system today.

It’s a personal filing system I’ve set up, and I don’t get that problem of “1000+ unread items” anymore – if I don’t need to know what happened last month in the world of gadgets, I can mark it all as read and move on without marking things read that I really wanted to check later.

…And unlike Robert, I don’t suffer the delusion that I can read everything.  I’d say that I come pretty close to clearing out my queue every night (I probably mark less than 400 items as read every day), but I don’t lose sleep over it.

4. The social network features suck. Managing friends in Google Reader is slow, and hard to do. Not that Twitter or Facebook is perfect but they are a LOT better than Google Reader. I am following more than 10,000 people, brands, objects etc in Twitter. THERE IS NO WAY I could do that efficiently in Google Reader.

Yeah, he’s right here.  But then Google Reader is a Serious Tool, not a water cooler for me.

5. I see most news faster on Twitter than in Google Reader. Where did Marissa Mayer announce Google's deal with Twitter? On Twitter. It didn't show up on my Google Reader until later after everyone had written blog posts.

See PubSubHubBub (PuSH).

6. Headline scanning is easier, and more interesting for some reason in Twitter than even in Google Reader's list view.

I couldn’t disagree more. This may be a matter of personal taste, though.

Anyone that does work with content management and creation has my strong recommendation to continue to use Google Reader as their primary nexus for information, and use Twitter as a secondary tool for observing clustering and conversation around those items.

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