Reader – The Google way of managing feeds

Edit: Reader now has a search bar. And you can hide the side navigation too.

I finally tried out Google Reader today (don’t know what took me so long). Reader is Google’s RSS/Atom feed reading tool, which allows you to subscribe to websites. This means that whenever the website is updated, you’ll be able to read it (full articles or summaries as the case may be) inside Reader. Obviously, it’s a great way of keeping track of new material posted on websites without having to open each website everyday. Of course, the website has to offer feeds for this to work.

So how good is Reader? Like all things Google, Reader’s biggest plus is its simple and easy-to-use UI. It took me less than two minutes to subscribe to a bunch of websites. You can subscribe by entering the feed URL of the website and if you don’t know it, you can just type the keywords and the search option will give you one. For certain social sites (Blogger, LJ, Flickr, etc) you can simply enter the user name of your friend, which makes the whole thing very simple. I see WordPress missing from the list, so you’ll have to add me manually. Categorizing them is also simple enough and in an instant, all my friends’ blogs went into the Blogs folder. The amazing thing is, you can actually share your Reader with others using the URL Google provides you.

On the downside, Reader cannot recognize if you have already subscribed to a site if you have changed its name. Of course, it is still under development, so I’m sure it will be fixed (if it wasn’t intended to behave like that).

For those who don’t want to use browser add-ons to read stuff from their favorite sites, Reader provides an excellent option, since everyone has a Google account anyway. To subscribe to this blog, use the RSS URL http://prasannapandit.wordpress.com/feed/ .