Google Reader Impressions

Google Reader is very very close to the perfect blog reader for me. The problem I have with reading blogs is information overload. It's great to be able to read the web in one place; it's awesome that everyone and anyone can do it; but, if you read everything that you subscribe to then you will be buried beneath it.

This is a fundamental difference between browsing the web and subscribing to it: when you browse, you do it for a limited amount of time and you miss things. When you subscribe, you don't miss anything - the less you read, the more you have to read.

Google Reader solves this nicely by introducing a recommendation system. By default, articles are sorted by relevance. Presumably, this rating is a function of links to the article and the previous items you have "starred" and who knows what-all-else. With this system, I can read for however long I feel like reading and not feel like I'm falling behind.

A few things I would really like to see on Google Reader are:

• statistics: I want to know what I'm reading, what I'm starring, who's posting, etc. from all of my subscriptions.

• time spent/posts read: while I'm reading, I want to know how much time I have been reading...

• search: I don't know what facility is there yet for searching, but this is a major boon to me. I can't even hazard a guess at the number of times I've remembered "something from a a blog" and spent hours on Google trying to find it to no avail.

Finally, wfzimmerman, at the "Unofficial Google Reader Blog" has some very good ideas to improve it:

• I've got to have a way of looking under the hood so I understand why it's giving me the articles that it does. I also want to be able to tweak my preferences to emphasize either my ostensible preferences -- give me more articles related to work -- or my actual preferences -- give me more articles related to Michigan Wolverine football.

• like this. For example, I read "Scoble on the Ray Ozzie memo". I'd have liked to have a memeorandum-like way to connect to highly networked conversations about Scoble on Ozzie.

• Recall. They need to work on adding filters or something to the 'by date' view so that Reader can also be used as a reliable current awareness tool -- something that lets you scan and evaluate every post related to a given topic. Maybe the best way to do this would be to provide an API and let people use it build monitoring tools like this new service from IBM.

• Let's program it in.

Lens: the Unofficial Google Reader Blog: Google Reader's relevance view: Trust but verify?

technorati tags: Google Reader