User>Driven

Last week I wrote about how Google Gears has made it possible for webapps to operate offline and how great that is for the everyday usability of webapps. Since then I've been trying out Google Reader, the first Gears-enabled application on the web and a pretty good RSS feed reader.

It is pretty darn good for a v1. Below is what I like and don't like about it, but first, why I prefer feeds to email and why (if you are as overwhelmed with email volume as I am) you will too.

Feeds are better than email

If you're like me, you get a ton of email every day. There's work email, personal email and the continuous tsunami of newsletters, promotions, digests, alerts and other commercial email - and that's not even counting the spam that gets only partially filtered out. And if you're like me you spend a lot of time just scanning it, deleting stuff you don't want, absorbing a few things you can read quickly, and flagging things you mean to read later (but more likely than not won't have time for). In fact, a lot of people I know use just about every idle moment in this scanning activity, frantically trying to stay ahead of the overwhelming tide of messages.

Happily, feeds are a whole different use model. Instead of the constant push of email updates to your creaking inbox, feeds allow you to pull content whenever you are ready to read it. This is a much less stressful way to interact with electronic content you want to see. It's much like time shifting with DVRs and Netflix. Instead of watching whatever is on TV when you happen to be free to sit down, your TiVo or ReplayTV allows you to pick the TV show of most interest to you at that moment from among everything that's been recorded but not yet watched. Netflix works the same way, allowing you to rank movies and TV shows on DVD and have them delivered to your home in that order.

Feed readers provide you a listing of the last several entries of content to which you've subscribed, such as from a blog, news service, comic strip, product review site, or what have you. You can subscribe to your favorite content and then have it all organized in your reader when you have time to look at it. So instead of worrying about keeping up with your inbox, you can reserve email for truly time-sensitive subjects like the note from your sister or your boss, then catch up with your feeds when you're more relaxed.

Firefox Live Bookmarks lets you organize your feeds into foldersMy favorite way to handle feeds was to use Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature. Live Bookmarks organized all my feeds into folders. I placed these on my links toolbar organized into a few major folders by topic. Scanning for new content was just a click or two away. But I could only get at this content on my laptop, leaving out using either my home Macs, my Crackberry or any other connected device. And I could only get at the content when connected, leaving out the two hours I spend on the train every weekday - an otherwise prime time for catching up.

Google Reader is more flexible

Enhanced with the ability to download all your feeds by Google Gears, Google Reader provides more flexibility in time shifting. Now you can read those feeds while you're disconnected from the web - on the train like me, or while lunching on a park bench, or at a hotel where the wireless is weak, or anywhere else you can't get a reliable connection. (And because it's a webapp, any connected device (including my Crackberry) can make my feeds accessible as soon as I log in, but let's talk about the new offline mode.)

Going offline with Google Reader is qucik and painless - if you remember to do itYou do have to click the little green "offline" arrow before you disconnect, but this allows the service to download the most recent 2000 entries from all of your feeds, and over a broadband connection I haven't seen this take more than a few seconds. Once you are in offline mode, the service acts like any webapp would when it's connected. Your content is all there for you to click around in and read. Well, almost. I'll get to weaknesses in a moment.

Content appears for each feed organized into panes like Gmail messages and complete with imagesThe interface is simple, though perhaps not as clean as Gmail. There is a familiar-looking left navigation bar with all of your feeds listed with the number of unread items in each. By default they are listed alphabetically but you can organize them into folders. On the right side of the page is the main reading window with a scrolling stack of entries for any given feed. Each entry is outlined and given a few lightweight controls, much like Gmail's message windows. It's all set up to let you scan for the content you like and read it without navigating through the clutter of an ad-driven website or find that one message you meant to read in your inbox.

(Just an aside on ad-driven sites. I like ZDNet for their reviews and I still subscribe to a few of their newsletters because I haven't figured out how to subscribe to a feed with just the subjects I want. But the clickpath from a ZDNet newsletter to an actual review is quite frustrating. If you read an interesting headline and teaser copy, you can click through to the article or review it refers to. Sort of. What you get is a landing page with ads with the same teaser copy you just read. If you click on the headline there, it takes you to the first page of the review - which is the summary page with nearly identical teaser copy and a link to the "full review." I can't decide if this is deliberate or just bad navigation, but the popover ads for various Ziff-Davis print publications give me a hint.)

Gum in the gears

Subscribing to feeds is easy provided Google can find themThere are a few things that interfere with the perfect enjoyment of my feeds. For one, it wasn't trivial getting all of my feeds into Google Reader. There is an import feature but it depends on you being able to export your feeds from your current reader and I couldn't figure out how to do that in Firefox. Neither Google nor Firefox 2.0 had any documentation on how to do this and there is no handy "export feeds" command I could find.

So I had to enter my feeds by hand. I have about 40, so I didn't think that would be too hard. Google Reader provides a feed search capability and this works most of the time. Occasionally, though, it couldn't find feeds by the name of the site, the URL of the site, or even the keywords in the name of the feed. In those cases, only the exact URL of the feed itself allowed me to find the feed. I don't know if this is Google or the feed publishers, but it slowed things down quite a bit.

Offline mode is easy to get in and out of, though once or twice it didn't seem to want to synch up my read items when I went back online. This is a beta, though, so I don't expect perfection. I also forgot to enter offline mode more than once this past week before leaving for the train, though, so I was out of luck. I wish there were a way for Gears to proactively download things in case you are caught offline unexpectedly. This is the model most thick client apps (like Outlook) use.

Some feeds only publish teaser copy making them worthless in offline modeThe most frustrating thing with offline mode, though, is feed publishers who allow only teaser copy to appear in their feed, requiring you to click through to their site for the full content. This makes offline mode useless, of course, because you can't follow the link to the site when you're not connected. I assume that feature exists so you'll be forced to view the ads on the site, but Pragmatic Marketing's site has no ads and their blogs show only preview copy in their feeds. Sorry guys, but that bites.

Feed me (and you too)

I'm addicted to feeds now and I've started unsubscribing to newsletters and promotional email from vendors and content providers I like because this method of keeping up with them is so much more under my control, so much less stressful. And Google Reader is my feed reader of choice at this point.

There are 334 feed subscribers to User>Driven as of this evening. So I am not the only one out there who sees the advantages of this medium. Check out Google Reader and subscribe to http://www.userdriven.org/blog/rss.xml to read this blog as a feed. Then post your thoughts as comments below.