About Google Reader
Ian: I have to agree with you - Google Reader rocks. So far, I’ve been quite reluctant on putting more personal information in other entities hands than what is necessary - specially when those entities are, as Google, expert in exploiting whatever they learn about you. Call me a paranoid, a privacy freak, or whatnot, but after fooling around a bit on Orkut, I decided to withdraw all of my participation there (and never engaged on explicit social network sites ever again - Of course, my participation in several mailing lists is tracked by many Web searchers, and I’m sure I’m well categorized in non-explicit social networks - To say the least, my GPG key is in the Debian keyring ;-) ). I never got a Gmail account and hope I’ll never have to - After all, gwolf.org gives me way more than 1Gb of space, is easily accessible and searchable (by me and only by me)… Why should I worry with that? But, yes, Google Reader gave me something I didn’t ever before have: The ability to read my RSS feeds from wherever, from whatever computer, without worrying about synchronizing. For the first time ever, I found my cell phone’s uncomfortable, tiny but usable Web browser good for something - whenever I cross the city, I can do it reading news or my friends’ life updates. That’s quite cool, and that’s the only reason I’m ditching Liferea. But unlike you, I would prefer a more mailbox-like system on Reader. And having to use non-free software sucks, as there is no way for me to change this but to bitch around :) Why do I like to treat my feeds as mail folders? Because there is certain coherence between them. If I just “read all”, I get a strange mixing of unrelated items. However, in Liferea, I went through each of my feeds, in order, unless (of course) I decided to jump to another one. And I can do the same in Reader, by clicking on each individual feed with pending items… But it’s a manual operation, and those should be avoided. Liferea does support acting as Google Reader, when you click on the “all unread items” virtual folder, but the default style is just the other one. Anyway… I know that overloading Reader with everybody’s preferences is not an option. I know I am not like most Google Reader’s users, and it sucks. I’ll have to get used to the more regular style (or write an aggregator for myself and host it at gwolf.org or such), but I’m too tied with other stuff to give it a go. :-/ Besides, I like to complain.
Comments
Gunnar 2006-10-09 05:11:01
Re: Re: About Google Reader
Nope… I use my regular gwolf.org address for identifying myself. What’s even worse, it’s Google itself that suggested me to use it ;-)
Hamish Moffatt 2006-10-08 14:54:28
Re: About Google Reader
TT-RSS is an ajax RSS reader you can run on your own server. No idea how the UI compares to Google Reader, but I like it and you’re not dependent on a third party.
http://tt-rss.spb.ru
Jon Aslund 2006-10-08 10:51:23
Re: About Google Reader
How can you use Google Reader without having a Gmail account? Don’t you have to login with the same username and password?