Why I Continue to Use Google Reader
October 29, 2009
Filed Under: in Analysis, Featured Articles, Real-Time Web, Sharing, Social Media, Startups
Author: Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
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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.
What I need in a reader (I haven’t found it) is the ability to say: this list of subjects is what I want to read about. Period. I don’t want to be the filter. In an always-on reader, I want fine-grained tunable filters. Feed level isn’t good enough: it has to be at the post level. Or better.Sometimes I want to drink from the firehose. Then I run to an accumulator like popurls.com. But life’s too short to be scrolling for a half hour. As for socializing: I do that at the club.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
I’ve been considering Fever (http://feedafever.com/) but it’s tough to know how well it will fit my needs without a demo, or at the very least a refund policy.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
You want Uncov’s product Persai. Or whatever he ended up calling it.It pretty much did that.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Scoble needs to check his head if he thinks Twitter even comes close to the power of Reader.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Great stuff.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Cause its FanDabby!
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Kevin: I find it funny that Rizzn didn’t even try lists before mouthing off.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Mouthing off? Robert, I thought I was more than sensitive (perhaps … worth debating?). And, actually, I have tried Twitter lists, and have been using them in Seesmic and Tweetdeck for months and months before Twitter rolled them out. I well aware of what lists can do… and very familiar with what Google Reader can do as well, for that matter. Pretty qualified, not exactly shooting from the hip. Or the mouth.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Seesmic and Tweetdeck do NOT have lists. Here’s one for you: http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/tech-news-brands — tell me, can you recreate that for me in Google Reader? I found I couldn’t (many of those are Twitter-only accounts) and even if I could my Google Reader takes MORE THAN A MINUTE TO START UP!!! Which renders it useless to me.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
You can do that with Seesmic. Construct a search using from:rizzn AND from:scobleizer AND from:seanpaune for instance.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
You can also create groups of twitterers to follow in Seesmic
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
You can also create groups of twitterers to follow in Seesmic native within the program.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
http://screencast.com/t/6HDGHHSsEL
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
I wasn’t saying, in my post, that Google Reader wasn’t useless for you… only you can determine that… only that Google Reader can continue to be useful for the vast majority of the rest of us.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Rizzn: just don’t add more than 500 friends. It’ll get useless and slow. Someday I’ll just open a new account and keep it small and clean. Of course, now that I have http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/tech-news-brands why do I need to redo all that work?
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Agreed. You shouldn’t hafta duplicate your efforts everywhere, and now that you’ve invested that time into using Twitter as a tool, you’re good. I’ve invested a lot of time into using Google Reader as a tool, though, and it continues to be quite useful to me. To each their own?
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
robert, you CAN create that list in a group here on friendfeed – http://friendfeed.com/tech-news-brands/ fairly easily…. the hard way would be to add all those twitter accounts one by one, but there’s a twitterlist2rss tool out there now that makes it a bit easier
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
robert, you CAN create that list in a group here on friendfeed – http://friendfeed.com/scoblizers-tech-news/ [sorry i misspelled there] fairly easily…. the hard way would be to add all those twitter accounts one by one, but there’s a twitterlist2rss tool out there now that makes it a bit easier
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Robert: Even at 500 friends, a load time slightly in excess of one minute for a free tool isn’t a whole lot to whine about. And yes, whining is exactly what you’re doing. How freakin’ entitled have we become when a load time of -gasp- a whole minute is something to declare a tool useless?
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Robert: As for TweetDeck … um, yes, you can build lists in it quite nicely, they are called "groups" and they don’t have that freakin’ popularity contest attached to them.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed
Reader and Twitter are two pretty different services. Choose one or both if it suits you and move on. the fact that people are getting so worked up over this post must mean that both services are pretty great.
This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed