10 Things I hate about Google Reader

[Edit: Google has since developed a few new, useful tools. There are still some old flaws around, however, the reader is quite usable now.]

[Edit 2: I've been using Reeder for a while now and it changes everything. It uses my Google Reader subscriptions and shows them in a beautiful and readable way. Built-in browser and easy "open in" buttons make it a blast to use. Highly recommended.]

Today’s web offers so many sources for creative individuals that it’s completely overwhelming. Everyone needs a way to concentrate on the most useful resources. It’s easy to manage couple sites and blogs and check them regularly.

The problem occurs when you have more sites to check. Try being up to date with 20 blogs. You will end up checking them everyday, most often to see that they haven’t been updated yet. You would waste a lot of your time.

RSS – Really Simple Syndication

If you want to follow many websites but still do it efficiently, RSS is for you.

Basically it’s a way of organizing websites and blogs you are following. Ever seen “subscribe” button on a website? When you click it, you will be taken to a simple black on white news feed where you can subscribe using your chosen reader.

Most people using Gmail, Google Calendar and other Google applications would think that it’s reader would be the best choice. I will show you how wrong this assumption can be.

10 things I hate about Google Reader

1. It’s slow! Whenever I open a post with a bunch of images, Google gets slower and slower. After just a few bigger posts it almost freezes. I thought my laptop gets old but I checked it on really fast machines and get same results. Just try viewing few Daily Inspirations on http://abduzeedo.com/. Nightmare!
2. Settings look. Have you seen those? Before I’ve seen it, I was sure that Google is one of the most progressive sites out there. When I look at Google Reader’s setting I’m not sure what year we have, 1995? One of biggest players in the industry should be able to create something more modern. (though I know people who actually like that design, most of them use computers like 5 mins a day for e-mail, using IE5 or 6)
3. Settings capabilities. Now you may think that poor design would mean that they were busy adding some real sorting, classifying and grading power. Unfortunately all you can do is create some folders, name them and add subscriptions in them. Grading is even worse. All you can do is give your favorites posts a star. You can’t even make folders out there.
4. Preferences. While I love simple solutions, being able to set language, start page, scroll tracking, navigation pane display and two miscellaneous options sounds a bit spartan to me. Where are my skins? Low contrast view for night surfing? White on black? Color adjustments? Selected blogs starting page (you can do it by making specific folder for them but it’s rather poor solution). When I check Gmail settings I’m overwhelmed with possibilities. I would like to see at least few more options in here as well.
5. Left menu. While folders list is quite obvious, the menu above it is just annoying. When I’m on laptop, it takes almost half of my screen. I can hide only two lines: Shared Items and Notes, leaving the rest all the time (if I want to leave All items and Starred items. You can hide that menu with a minus symbol but it will always start expanded). In addition there is a Start Sharing option. I understand that it can be useful but why do I have to look at it every time I open Reader? Creating small cross that would enable to delete that message would be a nice touch. It should be accessible from setting anyway, but not necessarily while viewing subscriptions.
6. Subscriptions. Managing them is a real pain. There is no easy way to change their order through setting (you need to be in a reader view to drag and drop them). When I first wanted to make folders for my subscriptions I clicked Folders and Tags settings. It took me a while to realize I can’t create folders there. I can delete them, make them public or not, but nothing else really. Creating new folders is managed by Subscriptions settings. In my opinion those two should be merged in one menu, where we could easily create new folders, move blogs and sites (drag and drop, maybe?). Folders should be expandable, so when we want to manage just few new blogs, we don’t have to search for them, they would just show under few lines of our collapsed folders.

I think those six alone are enough to change a platform. Last four are more about what I would find useful and time-saving:

7. Arrangeable Home page. As far as I know it’s completely up to Google Reader what is shown on reader’s Home page. I find it completely useless. I would love to set my most important blogs out there so when I have a moment I could access them instantly.
8. Virtual Folders. I love the concept of virtual folders. I would love to be able to move specific posts from different blogs to a folder. For example I have a few DIY photographic blogs in my subscriptions. Whenever I find something useful that I would like to try out in future, I would put that certain post into a folder. Then, during my holidays I could check all interesting DIY projects and execute them. No scrolling, no searching, they are all in a folder and it didn’t disturb my initial folders.
9. Starred items classification. For now we can only give one single star to posts. I would love to make catalogs for my favorite photos, articles, guest posts and so on. I’m using RSS to have all blogs and sites in one place but with Google Reader I have to go to one of social bookmarking sites to do manage my favs.
10. White on black. If it’s really hard to implement skins to the reader, why not just give us negative scheme so we could view images on neutral, black background.

I know the title is 10 things… but there is one more thing that I would find very useful:

11. Scalable images – photo-blogs implementation. I watch many photo-blogs. Few of them show images in the size that was posted on a blog and show only miniatures in RSS feed. Problem is that even though I see miniatures, my reader downloads full images and scales them down.

As you can see Google Reader is not a best way to arrange your subscriptions. You can view some screen shots down the page. I’m planning on writing a bit more about using RSS, managing many feeds and different options we have.

Cya soon. Hope you liked this little piece.