Monday, October 02, 2006

Google Reader redesigns

Google Reader, a feed reader similar to Ask.com's Bloglines, recently redesigned and is getting rave reviews ([1] [2] [3]).

If you try Google Reader and are in the mood to experiment, please also give Findory's feed reader a try. Unlike other feed readers, it constantly recommends other interesting articles and feeds. It uses what other Findory readers found to help you discover things you might otherwise miss.

See also my previous post, "RSS sucks and information overload", where I said, "The problem is that the current generation of feed readers merely reformat RSS for display."

See also my earlier post with details on Findory's feed reader.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Greg, you obviously know that I support Findory...but I simply can't think about it as a Feed Reader...especially not a Feed Reader of choice. Not without having the things I'm accustomed to using.

At a bare minimum, I'd like to see my OPML categorization (i.e., folders) kept when I import. In accordance to that, it would be nice to have the ability to click on the top level folder and see all items not only in the River of News style but using the intelligence of Findory.

Greg Linden said...

Good point on the folders, Ken. I'll make sure that is on the suggestions list, thanks.

Anonymous said...

Hey Greg,

Google Reader seems to have really de-emphasized their personalized relevance feature - you have to select All Items, then View Settings, then Sort by Auto. And I haven't seen a single blog post that comments on this. Do you think personalized relevance is simply not that important to most bloggers?

Thanks,
Jeff

Greg Linden said...

No, Jeff. At most, I think it means personalized relevance is hard to do well.

Just because Barnes & Noble and Wal-mart don't have a recommendation system like Amazon's doesn't mean that it is are not valuable to them. It only means Wal-mart and BN.com are having trouble implementing personalization.

I think the same goes for Google Reader. Personalized relevance is really hard. Google is going for the low hanging fruit first.