What is wrong with Goog$e reader


Like a lot of people I read s**t loads of RSS feeds. And for some reason, I can not remember, I use Goog$e Reader to do this. Now here is the problem: A Rss feed will normally only consist out of titles, so if the title sounds interesting I will open a new tab with this page and continue reading the feed. So I can't really say if I like or want to recomend this page.


So the whole conzept of recomending pages doesn't really work IMHO. I need to search for a reader that has a more email layout. Here is a little mockup how I would like the read to look like:

As you can see there is a little page preview. I don't know if this would actually make my reading more productive. When I am reading the feeds now I set my brain into a "filter mode" in which I just read the titles and decide if this interests me more but sometimes I also get information through the title alone and don't necessarily need to read the rest of the page. Anyhow reading through the stuff I recommended it was always something I could read in the reader directly and never just a title. So my advice to Goog$e if they want the "like" and "recommend" system to work they need to add a preview page.

4 comments:

Leo Antunes said...

...OR whatever feed you're reading should export more info, like or

...OR there's something wrong with how you've set GReader up (I use it too and don't remember running into any feed looking like your screenshot)

Slinky said...

I think you have a misconfigured Reader - http://www.openslinky.com/greader.png

Mark Embling said...

I'd tend to agree with Leo here - this is not a problem with Google Reader (or RSS readers in general), this is a symptom of poor RSS usage on the part of the content creator.

In my opinion there is nothing more annoying than RSS feeds which act like you describe. And they exist in their droves. Whats the point in RSS if you only get titles and links?

On my blog (and thankfully a lot of the blogs I follow in my RSS reader), I am sure to include the entire content within the feed. This means that people do not have to leave their feed reader in order to consume the content. More efficient for readers as they can read it without having to bust out a new browser tab, and better for me as I potentially have more readers.

I don't understand why everyone doesn't think this way, unless their RSS is an afterthought maybe...

vext01 said...

Didi,

Your reader interface looks to be switched in to a different mode to mine. I can click a title and it expands, then when i click again it reduces again.

But good question, why do we use reader?