I have only two problems with Google Reader.
The first is that it doesn’t support authenticated feeds. Ideally, I’d have liked to have a single reading list that combines my e-mail with newsfeeds. GMail offers RSS feeds of your e-mail. But the feeds require authentication (obviously) and Google Reader doesn’t support that right now. (So I usually don’t read e-mail 🙂
The second is that it’s tough to manage large feeds. It’s a personal quirk, really. I like to read all entries. If there are 100, I read all 100. If there are 1000, I struggle but read all 1000. I’m too scared to “Mark all read” because there are some sources that I don’t want to miss.
The 80-20 rule is at work here. There are some prolific writers (like Scoble) who write many entries a day. There are some prolific sources (del.icio.us or digg). I can’t keep up with such writers / sources. I don’t particularly want to. If I missed one day of del.icio.us popular items, I’ll just read the next day’s.
With Google Reader, that makes me uneasy. I don’t like having 200 unread items. I don’t like to mark them all read.
In such cases, popurls‘ approach is useful. It shows the top 15-30 entries of the popular sites as a snapshot. Any time you’re short of things to read, visit this. If you’re busy, don’t.
Using Google’s AJAX Feed API, it’s quite trivial to build your own feed reader. So I cloned popurls‘ layout into my bookmarks page, and put in feeds that I like.
You can customise my bookmarks page to use your own feeds. Save the page, open it in Notepad, and look for existing feeds. They’ll look like this:
"hacker news" : {
entries:15,
url:"http://news.ycombinator.com/rss"
},
The first line (“hacker news”) is the title of the feed. You can call it what you want. Set entries to the number of feed entries you want to show. Set url to the RSS feed URL. Save it, and you have your own feed reader. (If you want to put it up on your site, you may want to change the Google API key.)
Try it! Just save this page and edit the feeds.
Here, I must point out three things about Google’s AJAX Feed API that make it extremely powerful.
The obvious is that is allows Javascript access to RSS in a very easy way. That makes it very easy to integrate with any web page.
The second is subtler — it includes historical entries. So even if an RSS feed had only 10 entries, I could pick up the last 100 or 1,000, as long as Google has known about the feed for long enough. This is what makes Google Reader more of a platform rather than a simple feed reader application. Google Reader is a feed archiver — not just a feed reader.
The third (I’m a bit crazy here) is that you can use it to schedule tasks. Google’s FeedFetcher refreshes feeds every 3 hours or so. If you want to do something every three hours (or some multiple thereof — say every 24 hours), you can write a program that does what you want, and subscribe to it’s output as a feed.
You may notice that I have a Referrers to s-anand.net on my bookmarks page. These are the sites that someone clicked on to visit my site. I have a PHP application that searches my access log for external referrers. Rather than visit that page every time, I just made an RSS feed out of it and subscribed to it. Every three hours or so, Google accesses the URL. I search my access.log and archives the latest results. So, even after my access.log is trimmed by the server, I have it all on Google Reader to catch up with later.
Since Google doesn’t forget to ping, I can schedule some fairly time-critical processes this way. For instance, if I wanted to download each Dilbert strip, every day as it arrives, I can create an application that downloads the file and returns a feed entry. Now, I don’t need to remember to run it every day! I just subscribe to the application on Google Reader, and Google will remind the application to run every 3 hours. (I know — I could use a crontab, but somehow, I like this.) Plus I would get the Dilbert strip on my feed reader as a bonus.
Update: Google has just released PartnerBar, which is a more flexible way of viewing a snapshot of feeds.