I do most of my websurfing using a so-called news aggregator application. Instead of surfing to individual websites, you subscribe to their RSS feed from your news aggregator, which then sucks in the news from all over the web so you can read it all in one place.
Until now, I’ve been using NetNewsWire on the Mac even though I’m only moderately satisfied with it. Still, I never found a suitable (free) replacement (although XCast looks promising, especially if you’re into podcasts and video blogs).
It turns out that Google updated its Google Reader online news reading service last week, and having read favorable reviews (in my newsreader of course), I decided to give it a second try (the first version was too clunky to use).
I have to say I am quite impressed. Web-based applications have come a long way (and Ajax is responsible in no small part).
The speed and usability are really quite good:
- I can navigate from news item to news item with the space bar, which has always been my single most important requirement in a newsreader (and made me immediately reject those who require mouse clicking or various hot keys to navigate from feed to feed).
- I was able to import all my feeds from NetNewsWire.
- If I change computers, I don’t have to wade through posts I’ve already read on another computer since Google Reader knows what I’ve read or not. Other online newsreaders share this feature of course, but none of the ones I tried compelled me to even consider using them…
- Even better, you can « share » posts that you find interesting by clicking on a small icon. These posts are then automatically added to a shared items page that Google Reader creates automatically for you and that you can share with others (see the Links in the sknoblog sidebar also).
So far, only two things bother me:
- I can’t sort the posts the way I’m used to (minor).
- I can’t search the posts I’ve read. Amazing considering the who publishes this service. Still, it’s easy enough to navigate to an item of interest you’ve read, and I can’t help but believe that Google will address this, er, slight oversight.
So, while I don’t think the browser is the best place to do your word processing or number crunching, reading news feeds in a browser makes sense and feels quite natural.
The bottom line is that as of this writing, I haven’t opened NetNewsWire in a couple of days, which is saying a lot. We’ll see if it lasts.