Google Reader

Somehow over the past few years I have settled on Feedreader as my RSS aggregator of choice. Overall, it’s a good application, it had its minor issues along the way, but it was doing its job quite well. Throughout the years of my RSS subscription mania I have accumulated hundreds of feeds which became rather unmanageable and would generate thousands of posts in matter of hours. While majority of my computing hours are spent on a laptop, I do use several other machines scattered throughout New Jersey which made this machine specific reader a suboptimal solution. Yesterday, all that changed.

Considering I have been using a whole slew of Google’s services and products I figured I would move over to Google Reader and use this opportunity at the same time to consolidate and trim down my untamed RSS feeds. Now, it’s important to note that I used Google Reader in its infancy and wasn’t completely thrilled with it. However, while going through its settings and starting to use it again I was pleasantly surprised how much it has clearly improved from its early days in functionality, stability and performance.

I’m sure that another aspect which improved this experience was the process of starting fresh and only adding feeds to blogs I normally visit frequently and find valuable in several of my interest areas. I started by subscribing to a few Tech feeds and categorizing them into folders. While doing this I came across a couple of things that I wish could be changed in order to improve user experience.

First, it would be nice to be able to collapse the upper left hand grouping (containing links to Home, All Items, Starred Items, Trends and Your Stuff). I find them all to be useful, but would prefer to reduce the screen real estate they occupy.

Second, I believe that it would be very useful to be able to color code posts based on their folder assignment. In my example I would have all posts under “TechNews” folder show up in blue; posts from “Finance” folder in green; “IT Security” posts in red and so on. As majority of people rely on their visual senses to make quick decisions and filter through data I believe that most would find this option very helpful. While there might be (and if there is please let me know) an add-on to make this happen in Firefox, I think that it would be a nice touch to have this ability built-in.

Those are my first impressions of Google Reader. What are your experiences with it or RSS aggregators in general? Is there anything better out there or a way to improve an already pleasant user experience?