Google Online RSS Reader: Worst Than Having Nothing At All

Google just added RSS subscription/reading features to its personalized Google homepage. The news comes from Micropersuasion.

My first feeling was that this is excellent, another stone towards getting RSS in to mainstream.

But looking at how Google implemented these RSS features, I wonder if it weren't better for them to wait another month or so to bring us at least a usable online RSS aggregator.

First of all, finding the "Subscribe to RSS Feature" is an art by itself, since Google decided to hide the subscribe feature under a "Create a Section" link. Why can't we just abide by some standards to make things easier on users?

Second, all that Google's RSS functionality allows you to do is subscribe to feeds, which are then placed on your homepage as headlines, with the ability to select the number of headlines displayed, but no ability to see the descriptions or even full-text content.

If this is how Google plans to contend on the RSS market, they might as well not do it at all. The very least I would expect from them are feed filtering and merging capabilities.

Hey guys, but to me the revolutionary news about this is that you can now basically submit your RSS feed(s) to Google!

Isn't that some explosive news item, nonetheless we can't say exactly yet how Google will use this feed info?

I mean, when Yahoo did the same, all marketers raged about being now able to directly submit your content to the Yahoo search index, but now that Google is doing it, people see only a Web-based RSS reader?

What's the matter?

Posted by: Robin Good at July 27, 2005 8:39 AM

I haven't even tried it yet, but I'm very happy with www.start.com, nice and clean. Thanks for keeping me from wasting my time with the Google reader.

I agree with Robin, though. This is BIG news. A direct link into Google with an RSS feed. It wasn't long ago that I struggled to get my site indexed by Google. Now, it's simple.

I'll be waiting on the edge of my seat to see what Google does with the feeds the are now indexing.

Posted by: Doug Hudiburg at July 27, 2005 7:49 PM

Yahoo RSS and Live Bookmarks in Firefox aren't much better than Google's implementation and yet they are enough for some people. I can't figure it out, but not everyone consumes RSS in the way (and the quantity) that many of us do.

I agree that the real news here is Google's obvious collection of RSS feeds. Imagine what they *could* do with that info!

Posted by: Chris L at July 28, 2005 8:04 AM

To get news from Google I use GNews2RSS, an experimental convertor that takes a Google News search and turns it into RSS. It goes some way towards getting something from Google.

http://voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php

Posted by: John Murphy at August 1, 2005 10:45 PM

www.google.com/reader
the new rss feed reader.
found it buggy myself, but thats probably just me / servers getting hammered
couldnt import my feeds, unusable links etc.
how it sorts out over hte next few days

Posted by: dave at October 7, 2005 9:01 PM