Making the switch to Google Reader.

Up until today I really didn’t put a lot of thought into my RSS reader because well, I didn’t have one. Everyone has a reader right? At least everyone should, for the past year or so I’ve been putting all of my feeds into a dedicated tab on my Google homepage. While this method worked just fine it was far from convenient and very cumbersome when I actually wanted to read the articles.

I’ve played around with Google Reader before but I never really got into using it. I was just poking around today and I found that Google has made a widget for the Google Homepage that collects and displays all of your unread entries just like as if it were a single feed. I knew at that moment that I was completely sold.

I’ve only tried a couple other RSS readers but Google has to be one of the easiest to navigate. The tagging/folders feature is nice, it works a lot like the labels in Gmail and it allows for my growing collection of subscriptions to be easily organized. The ability to share feeds with your GTalk friends is also very cool. Another feature I stumbled across is the ability to use the reader in conjunction with Google Gears to create an offline RSS reader which could be nice for people that travel or are ‘disconnected’ from the outside world long enough to miss updates.

I’ve spent the better half of the day customizing and moving everything over, now I just have to get used to reading all of my favorite blogs through the minimal Google interface.