Has anyone tried Google Reader? There was quite a bit of buzz about it for a week or so, but I haven’t heard much since. I just tried it briefly. I know it’s a “lab”/beta product, but it’s definitely still quite rough around the edges, especially for a Google product. Someone at work had mentioned trying it with my web feed, but he was interrupted and I never heard the end of the story.

Thought I’d give it a spin for my self tonight. Here was the general experience (as always, click on most images to get a larger version):

After signing in (you’ll need a Google account, probably an gmail account), you’ll be greeted by a screen similar to the following:

First reactions:

• Cluttered. Too much going on.
• Too much text to read just to get started.

I went for the “enter the feed URL” link right away. Maybe there’s a better way, but that’s what I found first.

You’ll get something like this (although the technique seemed to change, so your experience may vary slightly):

I typed in the address of my web feed. This was a bit confusing however.

Preview? No. I just want to add it.

I’ve gone to the trouble of typing it in, am I likely to want to preview the feed? My 80% answer would definitely be just add it. Given that I only had 2 choices and Cancel seemed counter-productive, I went for the Preview button. Note the display issues it’s having in the screen shot above. CSS issues (as I’ll show in just a moment).

The terminology is a bit confusing for the average Google user. Unnecessarily so. Instead of sticking with “Subscriptions” and just “Add”, they throw in “feed” and for good measure, OPML. Not sure if those need to be so prominent right away. Feed I could live with, but hide away the OPML reference or put it somewhere else (like under More Actions).

I had to try this several times. I was greeted with this once:

I was greeted with the un-styled version once:

Finally, after repeated attempts:

Up it pops.The side bar on the left is a scrolling fly-out thingy … I don’t know how to describe it exactly. The bar stays in place while the list scrolls underneath. It’s odd. Since the bar is fixed, if you scroll to the bottom of the list, you actually end up with two entries showing, even though there’s room for about 7. It’s nice that the buttons above the list stay fixed, it makes it easy to navigate through the list.

That being said, this is a very slow way to browse blog entries. Click. Click. Click. Click. A newspaper style scrolling display is far easier to read and Google knows that. They do it every where else (all of their search listings for example require only use of the scroll bar to see and read results). So, I can only hope that this is just an experimental user interface.

I’m not going to spend too much time on this as I have no plans on being a RSS reading web convert any time soon. I spend too much time still off line that I don’t want to have all my RSS content unavailable or locked up within Google. It’s of course handy that I could read it anywhere, but there’s nothing new about Google’s play in the market that I can see (and there are a lot of other more mature options available for web only reading).

Oh, after some further playing around, I finally saw the “subscribe” button that you use after previewing the feed. Instead of a link (like the Add, it’s a button). I was totally overlooking it — but then again, it wasn’t obvious. (I didn’t even notice it until I pasted the image in above).

Try it out for yourself if you’re interested, but don’t expect to move all of your RSS reading to Google anytime soon.