I like Google's portal pictured on the left. Their new reader, announced at Web 2.0 today and pictured on the right, just does not compare. The portal outperforms the reader on all measures you would think the reader would be better at.
|
|
Neither interface scales well to a high number of sources, but you don't expect that with the portal. The portal displays more information in a single eyeful than the reader. Further, in the portal, fewer clicks are required to get to a given piece of information, and the information sources are clearly labeled.
Bottom line, from a usability perspective, the Google portal is a better feedreader than Google reader.
I agree, Bud. Scaling is the issue with feed readers, and Google Reader doesn't do much in the way of that. (I'm writing up my own review, too.) Isn't is awesome how fast bloggers can get info out there?
A web page is as long as you want. Why not stretch the legs out down the page, showing many more posts and feeds?
I have to agree with the scaleing however in my mind it is a differnt scaleing. I have 750+ feeds I like looking at and this is an overload on gReader at this point. I was able to load the feeds but it took close to 12 hours to get them all loaded and synced even with the opml support. The layout is typical google in that it is simple but for an rss reader it may be to simple. I keep going back and forth on my view about the gReader but for the most part it has been 2 thumbs down.