I’m still looking around at different feed aggregating solutions, following my frustration with tracking an ever-growing number of feeds in Google’s Personalised Home.

I’ve already looked at RSSOwl and decided that at the moment it doesn’t meet what I need. This time, I took a look at Google Reader, which is Google’s more advanced, but more bleeding edge, feed solution.

Google Reader is a Google Labs project and it’s a web-based reader. Labs is described as a “technology playground” and as such Reader is not a finished product according to Google. Still, it is definitely worthy of a Gizbuzz review. First of all, a full disclaimer. Huw is very much a fan of Reader and uses it for his feed aggregating needs. Before trying out Google Reader for this review, I’d only briefly played with it and so I’ve started my review with a open mind.

To begin with, I’ll do a quick refresh of my requirements for my feed reading solution:

• Must be cross-platform - either web based or runs on Windows and Linux (preferably Mac OS X support as well)
• Must be nice to look at whether web-based or desktop - it’s an app I’m going to use a lot
• Must give me an at-a-glance summary of all my feeds as well as a feature to look into each one
• Must have OPML import/export so I can import my feeds not re-enter them all manually
• I must feel comfortable using it (subjective, I know)

So, here’s the review (with screenshots hosted on Zooomr).

Interface

The interface is presented with two main columns. The left hand column is a list of your tracked items and clicking on an item in the left hand column displays the main article on the right.

The interface is very good, in my opinion. It’s clear and obvious how to read different stories and it’s really easy to scan through the list on the left, looking for content that’s interesting. One thing that could be done better is to make stories alternately coloured, as this would make scrolling through easier if you can see where one story ends and another begins.

The grey highlight that appears over the current story is also a good usability enhancement in that it’s easy to see where you are amongst the rest of news.

Reader’s interface is powered by Ajax, meaning that the whole app works without page loading and it’s really slick. It can sometimes lag on lower-spec machines, but I found it to be very fast and an experience on par with similar desktop solutions.

The interface’s best feature in my opinion (apart from being Ajax-powered) is actually a fairly minor thing. Scrolling the mousewheel when pointing at the left-hand list causes the list of stories to scroll as well, and it really makes GReader feel that bit more intuitive.

There are a couple of things I don’t like, however. The left hand list would be made much better if its size was modifiable - so on larger screen resolutions like mine, I could display more stories at once. Also, clicking on a story scrolls the list so that the selected story appears in the centre. I find this a bit disconcerting and it sometimes makes me lose track of a few stories just above that story and I find myself scrolling back up again and continuing.

One more very minor usability point is that the ‘Read items’ section (as opposed to ‘Home’, where you usually are) confused me at first. I was thinking it meant ‘Read items’ in the present tense, not in the past tense as it is referring to. This left me for a few moments wondering why I wasn’t getting any fresh content!

Functionality

Reader handles both Atom and RSS feeds, with Atom as its preferred format (Google seem to be behind Atom more than RSS as a syndication format). Reader has a few extra features than your average feed reader which are worth mentioning.

First of all, there’s ’starred items’. Like their Gmail, Picasa and numerous other equivalents, starred items are your favourite or important items. You can star feed items you find interesting and then share a list of your starred items with the ‘Share’ option.

Next, is labels. Interestingly, labels is also a concept that appears in other Google services and is brought well into Reader. You can label feeds or feed items according to what information they contain, and then use ’share’ on labels to share the stuff you find interesting with a particular area - gadgets, for example.

However, I have a few issues with Reader. Now I’m not sure whether this is true or whether it just seems like this, but Google Reader apparently places ‘weight’ on different feed sources according to their popularity and uses this weight to determine how far up they appear in the left-hand stack.

A real-world example here - I track the BBC News general news feed and a bucketload of tech sites. Now I’m still interested in the general news, but I’d rather place more ‘weight’ on my tech feeds than the main news. I’d just like to reiterate, I have no proof that this really is some clever algorithm, it may well be just that the volume of new content is higher on those particular feeds.

Still, hats of to Google; Reader is very easy to use and to get started with. You can search for content through the search box at the top, and reader will find content with an associated feed. You can also just paste in a feed URL and subscribe directly from the search box.

Conclusion

Google Reader is undoubtedly a very good feed reading solution. In this conclusion, I’m going to see if it meets my stringent requirements that I outlined at the top. Firstly, Reader is web-based so it’s inherently cross-platform. Simply enough - that’s one requirement satisfied.

As I’ve said, Reader’s interface is very slick and I’ve got no reservations about it being nice enough to look at every day. The only thing that annoys me slightly with it is how small the ‘feed stack’ on the left is when compared with how much screen real estate I’m prepared to give it.

The feed stack does give me a reasonably good at-a-glance feed summary. It’s not quite as easy to scan through as my Personalised Home (in my opinion), and I often found myself scrolling through a few pages of items on the stack before realising I’d caught up with the world. This differs from Personalised Home in that on Personalised Home I can easily see what content is new - read items are in a ‘visited link’ colour and new items show up in blue.

OPML import/export functionality is built right in, so I was able to import my list of feeds and get reading right away, which was nice. OPML export is also useful in case you want to backup your reading list, or read elsewhere or using a different reader.

And finally, the hardest and most subjective test to complete - whether I feel comfortable using it. I’ve used it for a few days now, in place of Personalised Home, and I’m just about starting to get used to the way it works. What put me off initially is that there is sort of a ‘learning curve’ when you switch from one solution to the next, but now I’m getting used to Reader.

I’m not switching cold turkey yet, and the quest for a better feed reader isn’t over yet either. I think I’ll augment Google IG with Reader for a while and we’ll see which one wins out in the long run. Of course, all the time I’ll investigate feed readers, so expect a review of a different application coming up in the near future.