I have been pondering over the last few weeks about once again using a feed reader like Google Reader to keep up with the multitude of sites I check on a regular basis. Part of "pondering" in this context means, I thought of it at one point during the day, and then forgot by the time I had free time. The other portion of "pondering" was whether to use such a reader to begin with. I have had some mixed feelings in the past about readers in general. One thing was the fact that I add too much crap and then don't use it. The other is that I sometimes do like the "random browsing" aspect of visiting the sites I frequent; a reader removes this. However, due to my much busier (and more structured!) life in the last almost half year or so, I decided to give the concept another shot. Also, there have been a few sites that I regularly check lately. Updates on one of these has been sporadic at times, and the others don't update every day. Basically, the sites updated less frequently either get checked several times before they update, or I forget and then remember in a week to get three updates... It seems prime time to just get a stream of all of that put together, instead of checking all of them "when I remembered".
I (re)checked out the Google Reader site on my lappy. It seems a good bit more featured than the last time I touched it so long ago. I deleted most of the the things I always skipped in the past, which should help. I remember recently looking up a version for Android, and paradoxically, they didn't have one. The paradox is especially true considering that the not only have many of the Google web apps in Android App form, they actually have a Podcast listening app that comes with the phone. This App is great, if a little buggy. Seems weird they had the audio equivalent without the text version. Anyway, there was another app out there that did do Google Reader, and I intended to install it one night, "when I remembered"...
On to the creepy part, though. As I went through the (desktop) web version, I thought, "I bet that there is an Android friendly web version", and if not, the full version might even work. I hit it up on the old Andriod, and for the 10 or so seconds I looked, it seemed usable. Then, on a whim, I googled "google reader for android". Got a news update from 30 minutes ago, stating that said app had been released. Creepy. I checked on a complete whim and was within 30 minutes of a release I didn't know was coming.
The app itself seems pretty standard, it's basically the gmail app but for RSS. I only skimmed it prior to this post, and might put up a more detailed review in a few days.
The thing I have always loved about the web version of Google Reader is that it pretty much addresses the main 2 things I absolutely hate about plain RSS. This is that the feed doesn't contain the actual content, and also only has the last couple of items. Google Reader on the web completely addresses this, hopefully so does the mobile version. In Google Reader, you get the complete article, with pictures and such and full text, formatted in a common way, even across disparate sites. This can be set up to be one long stream of every thing combined, or in groups, or in other ways I am probably behind on. It also goes back as far as you want to go -- it's not just the last 5 articles or so. I had a program idea to address both of these, by maintaining a complete list of articles locally, and scraping the site for the complete text, a few years before Google did it.
Maybe I should collect my money?
