“Google’s building a news reader”:http://www.google.com/reader, which is freaking awesome because I’m getting a wee bit tired of synching my news feeds between different computers. It’s Ajax-y, and running really slow right now (I think because of the load from the clicks of a thousand bloggers). (“via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2005/10/07/google-aggregator/)
Confused me for a minute there. When i read that the first thing i thought was “what is wrong with groups.google.com for reading usenet?”
then, obviously, i discovered that by ‘news’ you meant syndication feeds. Like email, i don’t think the web makes a good client for dealing with the content being pushed (or pulled). Actually, RSS and email are remarkably simular and i’ve found that using the same client for both, and the same filtering and rules engine can be remarkably useful.
rss2email + procmail + imap has solved all the rss problems for me, the largest of which was switching computers and locations so many times through the day.
And for the rest of us, who don’t have a dedicated server and the unix expertise to setup rss2emal with a procmail.rc containing tons of regular expressions (which we hand write, probably in emacs), this google powered web based rich interface feed reader will probably be a godsend.
Plus it’s Google, which has a huge, trusted brand. Will this push RSS out to the masses? Will my Mom (hi, Mom :)) be using it to check our website?