A couple of months ago, I had lamented about Blogger being the most uncared for of all Google's acquisitions, and at the same had expressed gladness that it gained some attention in the momentum established with the metamorphosis in Google's look and feel in May this year. The blogger's interface was changed too, initially only for volunteers using Blogger in Draft, a couple months later which was extended to all users.
Google Reader, the search giant's own feed aggregator , has snatched the title of the 'most neglected product', if I may. Not only the UX that makes it look alien to the Google family of products, but it looks like there has been no development on Google Reader at all.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
A look at the home page above shows how 2010 the reader app is.I have another fact to prove the negligence: If you go to Google Settings that looks even more horrible than the home page, and click the Send To tab, it still lists Orkut and even MySpace. If you already gasped, please exhale. The exclamatory par it, it does not list their own Google+!
There have been developments on smartphone apps though. The Google Reader Android app, that was released last year-end, has more rich features than its web counterpart. A few features like volume-key-navigation cannot be provided in the browser version, but some like mark-previous-as-read can be.
Does Google even remember their Reader exists and is used by millions of people to read about Google+ and many other new launches by Google and almost everyone else?
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Well on Google Reader I agree. I use Google Reader extensively and every time I think some other reader may be good, I have always come back to Reader.
ReplyDeleteBut I wouldn't want them to upgrade Reader's UX to that of other google apps. I somehow don't like "over-simplistic" look and feel where fields are very much indistinguishable from each other. Already my gmail inbox is so crammed up with emails, seems them running into each other makes think of a bad and loose HTML page. Don't want that to happen to Reader.
But yes I would want some more feature upgrades in Reader. Chrome has an extension which actually loads the entire page in reader (with a click ofcourse; you can load only the text from the page or in its original look and feel). Sadly that extension is not there in FF. I would want that. and then some faster way to mark items read (either-or option doesn't work for me).
Let's hope someone is listening.
Well, I like the simplistic UI; it took me a couple days to get used to it, but it brought a new freshness to Google products, which I certainly miss in Google Reader.
ReplyDeleteThe feature I miss most is the 'Mark previous items as read' that exists in the Android App. There can be many more interesting features that can be implemented in the feed aggregator but the reader has not evolved since the time I started using it 4 years ago.
Except the Super Full Feeds extension, which is a good one, though I it only for feeds that are short feeds. I am lazy at downloading extensions; anyway I believe the basic functionality should be part of the app rather than an extension.
Could be a victim of corporate bureaucracy...
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