Nicholas Pike

Microsoft is desperately trying to market the upcoming Halo 3 for the Xbox 360 to Korea:

The Battle of Feed Readers

So back when Google Reader originaly came out (October 2005) I gave it a whirl. In general its like everything else google: feature packed, web 2.0, and ugly. Of course its still in Google Labs, which means its public beta.

Back then Google Reader had a few problems for me:

• The interface is overly clunky. I just want to read my RSS feeds from various sites in a simple and organized manner.
• Google Reader doesn’t always pick up updates on feeds until several hours after the site has made updates.
• You have to leave Firefox open if you want constant notification of your news.

The later problem really isn’t that huge of a problem for me, considering I mostly leave Firefox open anyway just for my Google Calendar Notifier.

So I switched to using a standalone windows client, on my home machine and my work machine.

FeedReader3

FeedReader is actually a really cool piece of windows software, with a very minimalistic and quick responding interface.

I do desire to continue using it, but my mobility is now an issue. I read RSS news at work , at home, and on my laptop (which is at my girlfriends house). With the amount of feeds that I now subscribe to, manageability and synchronization of my well desired news is becoming a difficult dilemma.

Naturally, this is where Google comes in – “Searching your life.”

Since that October, Google Reader has been updated a few times — lets hope they have resolved my key issues with it. I will give it a try for the weekend

Below is a screenshot of my Google Reader account.