Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

Last week, Google came up with a new version of their web based RSS Reader, Google Reader. Contrary to the original release, this one got very positive reviews. I had also tried the initial version of the Google Reader and gave up after a while. It was just awkward. It did not work for me at all, and I could not even speculate what they were trying to do.

I then tried Netvibes and the experience has been quite the opposite, so I have been using Netvibes as my RSS reader and have been quite happy with it.

When the new version of the Google Reader came up, I was not eager to try, then I saw other posts and comments and am interested in the “river of news ” approach, so I’ve decided to try it again. This time around, experience was much better. I did like the river of news pattern, so I’ve exported my opml from Netvibes and imported into Google Reader, and I was good to go.

I’ve been using Google Reader as my RSS Reader for the last week, and my initial positive impression gradually has been replaced with frustration as I continue to use it due to usability issues, and bad design. Google Reader UI gets in the way, and is missing some basic functionality.

• Caching of the posts

I find myself waiting for the UI to get data, and this is quite annoying, and waste of time. Everytime I click to a feed, it seems to get the post for that feed on demand, and this is just not right, if you use RSS reader regularly. This is complete opposite of the Gmail experience, what were they thinking?

Netvibes on the other hand, has the posts cached in the browser, when I click something, response is immediate. I had not realized how great this was, till I got frustrated by Google Reader.

• Auto refresh

Google reader does not refresh the feeds, at least by default. I have to go click refresh every time? In their video , Google engineer uses the analogy to email and says that the Google Reader is the inbox for the web. I don’t have to click get mail when I need to read email, why do I have to do that with RSS ?

Again, Netvibes shines. I can see how many new posts there are total, at each tab, and for each feed. Works for me.

• No way to mark a post read

When there are a lot of new posts, I often scan the title of the posts (similar to reading the subject of an email) and decide whether or not I need to read the post. In Google Reader, I could not find a way to mark it read without opening it, and when I open a post it takes over the screen, I had to click the title again to close it. Very time consuming.

I did find out later that I can use the keyboard and push some letters to go down the list and mark a post read without opening it. Great, thanks for nothing! I can feel the developer who thinks vi is the greatest editor behind the design decisions. This is what happens when engineers develop something for their own use. Newsflash, people out there do not necessarily want to learn a set of key combinations to use a web site. In fact, the web is what it is because you can use it once you understand point and click, all sites work the same. You want to have keyboard control as well, great, have that, there are many people (read techies) who like that, but don’t make it the only way to do something.

Again, this is no issue with Netvibes, I can mark a feed or tab read with a mouse click.

So I gave up on using Google Reader once again, despite my liking to the layout. A lot of people liked the fact that it is like gmail. I guess I don’t like the fact that it is not like gmail enough. None of what I’ve listed above is hard to fix. Considering how much it improved compared to the previous release, I have every reason to hope that these issues will be resolved.

Will I give it another chance in the future, likely. In the mean time, Netvibes is getting better continuously and meeting my needs, so I’ll stick with them.