I have been reading feeds in Google Reader this morning (I prefer Feedly but it wasn’t working this morning for some reason). I use Firefox as my primary browser after being a fairly dedicated Safari user for a while and a momentary Chrome fan. I’m not saying that Safari and Chrome are lousy browsers because they aren’t, they are terrific browsers (although Chrome on the Mac is still a developer build and not feature complete).
The reason why I am a Firefox fan again is that I found the one extension that caused a 20+ second lag in load times (it was a weather extension) and I cut my extensions back to the ones I really like. Many of those extensions are Gina Trapani’sBetter Webapps extensions which run on Greasemonkey. One of those extensions is Better GReader which adds some enhancements to Google Reader. One of those enhancements is a range of colours to help distinguish between feed sources. The extension converts the usual Google Reader experience from this:
… into this:
Firefox probably won’t have this edge for too much longer. Chrome for the Mac should be done by the end of the year and version 4 brings extensions capability. It also looks like Gina will probably port her Better Webapps to Chrome too. Better Webapps extensions for Chrome will make a feature complete Chrome a lot more appealing to me although I am really enjoying Firefox again. The one that put me off Firefox initially was its really slow load time. It also didn’t help that Firefox was using so much memory either.
By the way, if you are interested in the stuff that interests me, take a look at my shared feeds page.
(You can probably tell I am a Gina Trapani fan although that doesn’t detract from her awesome apps. She recently published the Complete Guide to Google Wave and is one of the panelists on This Week in Google.)
I have just returned from a RSS hiatus. The weather was fine and the conversation on Twitter and FriendFeed has been great but I just wasn’t consuming much of the 800-odd feeds I currently subscribe to. So what I did was set up a Google Reader instance using Fluid.app (in other words, I have a dedicated browser window for Google Reader without location, bookmark and menu bars) and that is my primary RSS consumption engine.
I’ve been using Google Reader more and more lately, particularly since news broke about PubSubHubbub and Newsgator’s new sync relationship between its desktop RSS readers and Google Reader rather than its own Newsgator Online. I’ve been hoping that I could sync NetNewsWire with Google Reader and I am pretty happy that it is now possible (although I generally prefer Google Reader itself to NNW). PubSubHubbub has also introduced near real-time feed updates into Google Reader and back out again into services like FriendFeed and that is very cool. Take a look at this demo, for example:
It gets better. This little toolbar, below, which we are probably all familiar with has been getting a lot more use from me and it has me thinking about what the next iteration of the real-time Web is going to look like (particularly after the recent news about FriendFeed’s acquisition and speculation about its fate as Facebook digs in).
Everyone seems to have the ability to “Like” stuff. I’ve been using it on and off in Google Reader although I’m not sure what the overall utility of that is. I have been sharing posts more often and these items are appearing in FriendFeed almost instantaneously. The ability to add comments introduces a sort of micro-blogging functionality to what are otherwise bland feed items shares and turn them into conversation items. There doesn’t seem to be all that much scope to engage in a conversation around an item in Google Reader itself just yet but streaming these shares into services like FriendFeed does achieve that quite nicely.
I decided to play around with the “Email” option this evening and sent a couple posts to two locations. The first location was to my Evernote account using my top secret email address. The result was a copy of the post in my Evernote account which I could neatly file away. I often grab posts that interest me and capture them into Evernote for future reference or to read when I have some time. This option makes it really easy to send that stuff right from the same place I aggregate and read a variety of news items. I probably sent more stuff to Evernote in 10 minutes than I did in the last few days. Everything is in one place, its very easy.
Another place I sent a feed item to is Posterous. This works because when I email a feed item, I send it using my Gmail address which Posterous recognises. The result is a pretty easy share on Posterous (which reposts elsewhere). Take this example of a post Rich Mulholland posted recently as an example:
Google Reader is beginning to look more and more like a central hub for my social and information gathering habits. Given the uncertainty about FriendFeed there is some talk about where to go next and what to use in a post-FriendFeed world (ok, really, FriendFeed is still running quite nicely and will for the time being). Facebook isn’t a top favourite with the FF-digerati and that is the top social network in the world. Looking to Twitter and the heir to the FriendFeed throne is a couple steps backwards so I started thinking that, perhaps, we should be reconceptualising what the social, real-time Web will look like in the coming months and years. I wonder if we won’t see Google Reader (or some future version of it) become a big part of that new social Web?
