I started using Google Reader some time ago as I needed a feed reader on my laptop, and I couldn’t find a decent software for OSX. The nice thing about it is that I don’t have to mark something as read twice on two different boxes, when I’m using that.
It wasn’t that good of an advantage up to a few weeks ago as I wasn’t able to use it from Konqueror and I still used Akregator. Now that I was using GNOME on Enterprise, with Epiphany, I did make use of Google Reader a lot more.
One feature I am using a lot is the “Star”. I’m “Starring” all the posts I want to write about in the blog for the future, and I pick them up when I have time to write a few blog posts that don’t refer to anything coming up right away. It’s a nice thing to have material to write about, when you feel like you need to made known that you’re still alive.
There are a few issues though, that I’d really love for Google to address, one day. The first is that it lacks filters, and the second is, similarly, that it doesn’t have any support for understanding that the same post might appear on more than one feed.
The filters would come useful for, say, ignoring my own posts on Gentoo Universe, I wrote them, I don’t need to read them too.
The duplicated post support instead would allow for me, for instance, to read just once Matthew Garret’s posts, rather than reading them on Kernel Planet, Planet Debian and Planet GNOME. He’s a bit of an extreme case, but there are many other developers who post on multiple planets.
Also, it would be nice if private blogs in blogspot were fed to Google Reader when logged in with an authorized account. A friend of mine added to a blogspot private blog, but there is no feed, and Google Reader can’t read it, even though I’m using my single sign-on Google account on both.
Give me these features and I’ll gladly make Google Reader my only RSS reader, ever. But it’s probably going to be my only RSS reader for a while anyway.
Some folks use Yahoo Pipes to find duplicates. I think Dawn Foster has one that does this.
Hmm … giving any information to Google is not good in my opinion. Having this in mind, I looked around to find something different – and found http://www.alesti.org .I don’t know how comparable it is to Google Reader in functionality though. I know that they do NOT have a filter in some way. (But perhaps they are more open to feedback than Google).