2 Comments

  1. Mymsie: I agree with your complaints with Google Reader and, unfortunately, there is not much that can be done about any of them.

    As for categorizing the feeds, it is definitely a 2-step process (add the feed, then categorize it), but at least it’s only something that has to be done once for each feed; it’s not something you do every day.

    As for the feeds being full or truncated, thats an area of great debate by content publishers right now. Many site offer partial feeds to drive more traffic to their sites (and thus more ad revenue.) Other sites include ads in the feeds. There was an article today on ProBlogger.com about this very topic.

    Google is looking to add some new features in the near term. One is an automated update notification process, so there is not such a delay between a post and recognition of it by Google Reader. That being said, I use a plugin on my site that updates the Google-spec sitemap.xml file and pings Google each time I create a new post, and it still takes Google Reader several hours to acknowledge the update. According to this article, the plan is for feeds to be updated within one hour when there’s more than one subscriber to a feed, or once in three hours if there is only one. 2/3rds of their 10s of millions of feeds have only one subscriber!

    There is no way to comment on posts via a reader; there is no standard for that. There is no getting around visiting a site to do that. Of course, you’d need to subscribe to comment feeds for the site or comments for a particular post and track them in Google Reader as well!

    Google is looking to allow users to recommend feed items to others and comment as to why they are recommending it, but this is not the same as actually leaving a comment on the entry itself. I hope this doesn’t decrease the likelihood of commenting on the original article, but I think it could. Similar to the way people comment on submissions at Digg.com, rather than leaving a comment on the site that is being “dugg.” But it’s probably all a wash if it drives additional site traffic.

    Anyway, I’ve started to come-up with my own list of complaints. The good news is that Google constantly improves products with the happiness of the customer being first priority. I’m sure Google Reader will continue to be the best feed reader on the Internet!

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