I’m a self-confessed Google lover; I have my google homepage, my gmail, my google calendar, and various other bits and bobs. Thus, it should come as no surprise that when I found a funky new application in their labs about a month ago, I signed right up.
Google Reader is a web-based feed aggregator. It’s still in beta, so there are a few bugs here and there, but by and large it’s quite a nifty little piece of software. Interface-wise, it looks rather like GMail, RSS items are listed rather like e-mails would be, and you have the ability to apply your own tags to the news items. The feeds themselves act like folders, and can be sorted in their own folder hierarchy.
A nice little feature of Google Reader, though, is that you can mark items that you particularly like as “shared”, and these shared items can then be viewed by other people, with the link, or can be displayed on your own website.
On the subject of bugs, the only one that causes me any real annoyance is that, occasionally, one item, or several contiguous items from a feed will be duplicated. Now and then, a little red bubble will appear top centre saying “Oops there’s been an error”, but nothing obvious happens; once in a while the interface will just refuse to load, but this is always fixed by a refresh.