News Junkie: Getting going with Google Reader

I’ve been using RSS readers since the dawn of time. What amazes me most is that the rest of the world hasn’t, apparently, followed. What, to me, is a killer app, is mostly ho-hum to most people. I’ll admit to being something of a news junkie. I read news sites. I read blogs. And so on.

You may be asking, “If I knew what an RSS reader was, what would I do with it?” That’s fine. I accept that. You’re totally missing out, but I won’t fight it.

For a long time, I used stand-alone applications like SharpReader and there were a couple before that, but I’ve forgotten the names. The problem with the stand-alone apps is that your RSS feeds wouldn’t be synced on multiple computers. So if you had read all the recent entries of news site X, your reader at another computer wouldn’t know that. Hence the rise of web-based RSS readers.

For several years I stuck with Bloglines.com. Bloglines was and still is a fine RSS reader. It’s very lean and works well. I used to keep between 70 and 100 subscriptions in there, and for a long time it was fine.

The downside of Bloglines is that they’ve been a little slow to change things. They hit upon a formula that worked, but they don’t seem to want to tinker much. So it’s good, but these days it’s almost a little too bare-bones.

I had heard about Google Reader and decided to give it a whirl. My first impression was that it was more Web 2.0 than Bloglines. It had better features for sharing and such, and the implementation seemed savvier.

It took a little bit of adjustment, but I’ve been using Google Reader for several months now and really like the service. As a replacement for Bloglines, it does the job, plus it’s got some of the more recent technology such as AJAX.

I also tried a service called Rojo, but I didn’t like the interface. It was very Web 2.0 … too Web2.0 perhaps. It was fussy and mostly got in the way of my blog reading, which is where Bloglines and Google Reader excel.

Actually if you’re looking to keep track of more blogs and RSS feeds, I’d recommend either Google Reader or Bloglines. Both of them work very well.