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3 Responses to “Google Reader: not for news junkies?”

1. drew says:
   July 9th, 2007 at 4:02 pm

   I use Google Reader and while it’s the best of it’s kind, it’s still crap especially if your feed reading is high volume. The latency of being a web app is nearly unbearable for me. Items only stay unread for 30 days which sort of makes them unexpectedly disappear. Of course they don’t tell you this. It’s a rude shock when you are saving a bunch of items (”I’ll get to these later”) and then suddenly they are all ‘gone’. Filtering is non-existent (e.g. View all starred items from this feed). Viewing items in reverse chronolgical order doesn’t work very well when you switch to ‘all items’ view. There should be a ‘Recently viewed’ folder. Often I view an item and then want to go back to it but can’t remember which feed it was in.

   Oh, and no search. From a company whose business is search.

   Of course the real solution to the synchronization problem is to have local ‘native’ apps that simply synchronize to some server on the network through an API. It should behave like IMAP behaves. In fact, that’s the way nearly every ‘web’ app should work. No problem to access it through your browser or through a ‘real’, responsive application on your desktop.

2. dsandler says:
   July 9th, 2007 at 4:26 pm

   @drew: I’m generally in agreement with you about local apps that sync. But there are two things that stand in the way:

   1. Sync is pretty hard. I’ve tried using Mail.app + IMAP as my go-anywhere email solution, and the results are usually OK, but sometimes totally disastrous.
   2. I can’t always install a native app. Being able to get my email on some random Windows machine is a huge win.

   Many people I know claim to cover this gap by using the Gmail web interface only in such “hostile territory” and using Thunderbird or Mail.app at home, but to do this means totally foregoing Gmail tags and archival. (I don’t think I could ever go back to the 5000-message Inbox.)

3. drew says:
   July 9th, 2007 at 5:29 pm

   I disagree that sync is hard, at least until you have to handle conflicting updates. IMAP may not be a model to work from but it does capture the idea that your data should stay on a network accessible server while ‘local’ apps interface to it (Although I’m still surprised you have had problems, especially ‘disastrous’ ones. IMAP has always been good to me.)

   The last sentence in my previous post made it clear that I wasn’t trying to prohibit in-browser ‘apps’, the two are not mutually exclusive; they can co-exist. My e-mail account can be accessed through webmail or IMAP. People should use what they like and undoubtedly there are some cases where in-browser is useful. But native apps, as a rule, are far more responsive, more efficient, have more functionality and are easier to write. There is a reason your desktop apps aren’t written in javascript and HTML.

   Steve Jobs thinks so too. At the D5 conference he outlined how things should work. You have your native app and that connects to resources or services that exist on the Internet. That’s how Google maps works on the IPhone. Having that functionality in the browser is clearly suboptimal. (He let 3rd party developers down regarding this vision when he withheld an SDK, but that was for strategic, non-technical reasons [which I don’t agree with in any case]).

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