I use Google Reader religiously. Google Reader is one of my first web destinations in the morning and one of the last at the end of the day. I skim titles looking for clues as to what will be of interest to me (I only view items in the ‘list’ format, I’d be dead and buried by the time I got to the end if I viewed in the ‘expanded’ format). My Reader account keeps me informed, in-the-know, and on top of the latest bit of intelligence I can hope to find. I replaced my once beloved Bloglines for this service.
Now Google Reader has become my biggest nemesis, a time-waster if you will, the bigger it gets. Loosely organized and, because it’s based on RSS feeds, not real-time by any stretch of the imagination (our own blog posts here on SemanticHacker.com take hours to show up) I can spend literally hours perusing the information tsunami that happens on a daily basis. Like most of the population I have many interests from keeping up with the latest social media marketing craze to what’s happening in the world of semantic web applications to finding fun toys at discount prices I can buy for my kids.
What are Google Reader’s Shortcomings?
1. Organizing feeds is a manual process.
Every time I subscribe to a new RSS feed, I need to manually place it into a folder. Many times the feed I subscribe too crosses the line of the topics it covers (TechCrunch is a prime example of this).
2. The ‘starring’ option is an unusable feature.
Relevant to the point above, unless Google can automatically organize my starred items, this is as pointless as starring something in Gmail. Likewise for items I’ve shared and those the people I follow have shared.
3. Search is nice, but of course, keyword-based.
Steve Rubel thinks it’s a good personal database search using Google, but let’s face it – it doesn’t solve the overwhelming-amount-of-information-problem. If I search for ‘Facebook acquisition,’ there is no context in which it searches. Essentially I’m still forced to filter through (in my case) 740 items.
How Google Reader Can Be Better
1. Make it real-time.
Go beyond RSS. Allow me to add my Twitter accounts (I manage more than 1) and Facebook account. Maybe Google Caffeine gets us closer.
2. Automatically organize my feeds.
Don’t allow me to create folders and force a feed into a single topic. Sure it would be smart to allow the user to rename the folder, but the immediate organization of the feed shouldn’t be so daunting or simplistic – “marketing” is too broad and I don’t have the time or patience to narrow these down further.
3. Fix search.
A loaded statement for sure, but show me related items in my feeds just by using a specific article as the basis for a search. Blatant plug here, but if everything was indexed and tagged with a Semantic Signature, this feature would be a no-brainer. Why rely on keyword matching when I already have an idea of what more I want to see?
Recently TechCrunch had their own idea of what else needs fixing with the newer “like” feature and I fully concur so I don’t think I need to rehash that.These are just a few of my wish list items for Google Reader and they are making an effort to add functionality, so perhaps one day I will see something like one of these I mentioned above come to fruition.