Theresa O’Connor

Google Reader

I’ve been trying out Google Reader as a potential Bloglines replacement ever since the big Reader update a month ago. I’ve planned to write up a review after a few weeks of heavy usage. Conor O’Neill beat me to it, by writing a Google Reader review which contains pretty much everything I wanted to say about it. So I figure I should add my voice to the chorus:

I’ve found it very frustrating that you can’t put a feed in a folder at subscription time. This one feature would makes me happy as a clam. The work-around — to go into the ‘Manage subscriptions’ page and organize uncategorized feeds — is painfully slow. I mean, I can’t even load the ‘Manage subscriptions’ page in under 5 minutes (Firefox 2 on a PowerBook G4)! Basiclaly, Google Reader’s tools for organizing feeds don’t scale to large subscription lists. Otherwise, It’s a great piece of work — despite this pain I’ve been very reluctant to switch back to Bloglines.

Hey, wow, you can organize feeds at subscription-time now. How awesome is that? The Google Reader team rocks! :)

Unfortunately, this only works from the subscription box inside Reader and not the bookmarklet, and I pretty much only subscribe to things via the bookmarklet.