Feed Reading
In between near-constant refreshing of Firefox to get the current location of my Macbook I’ve decided to give Google Reader a go for keeping up to date with all the blogs and news sites that I read.
When I get into work, I spend a good while visiting nearly all the sites I regularly read. You can find links to most of them on my useful page. The problem with this page is that it requires me to update the page when I find something new, and of course it’s hard to see what exactly I do read. Of course, the page serves me well and I’ll keep using it for other useful stuff like webmail and banking.
The reason the maintenance of the list of what I read popped into my head is because of a new feature that Google has introduced to Reader that I’ve read about on Matt Cutt’s Blog, where you can see exactly what you did read, making it easy to prune the wheat from the chaff. It’ll be interesting to see if using Google Reader does save me time, or cost me even more as I add RSS feeds to it.
Reader is yet another service I’m using from Google. Even though I probably visit Google hundreds of times a day to run searches, over the last year they’ve got me coming back for more, more, more. For example, Google Calendar is absolutely brilliant – having all of my appointments stored in one central location online, where I can access it and cleverly, store them seperate calendars so I can keep my work and home life seperate is an absolute godsend. It sends the nearest alternative, Outlook, packing. Google Desktop means I can quickly find anything on my PC and Google Talk means I can keep in contact with my colleagues easily and without all the crap MSN/Windoze Live Messenger forces on me. It’ll be interesting to see if and how the world catches up. I seriously hope that it does because I think Microsoft’s problem has been no decent competition, hence the complete stagnation of it’s products.