Google Reader
I feel like I’ve been living under a rock. If you take a step back and don’t actively seek out new tech solutions, they are definitely not coming to you (unless they are listed in your aggregator!!!)
I struggle with recommending a good aggregator to people. Bloglines has always been too cumbersome for my taste, and I really like Sage, which integrates into Firefox. However, with Sage, I have not been able to find the time and energy to coordinate my reading list on various computers that I use. I was reading a blog last night which mentioned Google Reader, so I immediately tried it out. I imported my opml file from Firefox very easily and then started playing around with how it works. There are a few constraints that I don’t like, particularly the fact that once a subscription is set up, you have to go into Manage Subscriptions to change the category it is assigned to, which seems a little less intuitive than Google Mail.
The things I love:
-You can easily pull a Subscribe button to the top of your browser in order to easily add subscriptions while reading.
-No importing issues: When I pulled my bookmarks in from Sage, it maintained all the folder categories I had set up.
-You can star important items to come back to later (!), much like Google Mail.
-You can share items that will show up on a unique url.
-Items are easier to read than they were in Sage. Whereas Sage had a two-column format (that I don’t see any place to modify), Google Reader is one column with larger font.
The only thing I miss about Sage— it detects feeds for you. I could suspect there is a feed somewhere, click to subscribe, and I navigate away from the page only to find there is no feed. However, there’s no reason I can’t confirm there is a feed with Sage and then add the subscription to Google Reader.