For the past several years I have used Google Reader as my go-to source for sifting through information on the web. I am subscribed to several dozen RSS feeds covering my various interests, largely scientific journals, baseball, food and politics. Reader allows me to quickly and efficiently sort through several hundred posts/stories a day and see which ones I want to explore more in depth and which I can just gloss over. Given the amount of information produced on a daily basis, this has become the only way I can hope to stay informed across a wide variety of topics while simultaneously having time to do all of the things I need to do in life (parent, teach, research, read, write, sleep, etc…). Google recently changed the look of Google Reader much for the worse and this is my rant.
Google Reader’s primary function is for reading! The new look now has shrunk the reading area while expanding various bars, buttons and sub-menus around the margins. Any redesign should have taken the opposite approach. Now I’m looking at alternative RSS harvesters…
Not being a Google Reader regular, this post prompted me to check out the new look. Have you tried the “Reader Play” option for looking through your feeds? It’s under “Feed Settings” once you’ve selected an RSS feed.
I have never noticed that option before. It might be nice for longer posts that I want to read, but doesn’t seem practical for scanning through a whole set of posts.