New Google Reader

For all those out there who are passionate about RSS aggregator and are looking for the best offering out there which helps them best track what they are following on web on day today basis, there is something to cheer about. Google has released a completely revamped Google Reader . As always, they were very modest while releasing this completely new RSS aggregator. The philosophy for the new UI is simple: Your inbox for the web. And they have done this is most elegant way. I have been trying quite a few web based RSS aggregator. Yahoo along with its new Yahoo! Mail also released a completely new RSS aggregator, which is quite similar to new Google Reader. However the service has bit of glitches. It does not show you how many of the feeds are still unread. Also at times the RSS feeds do not come through properly. Its bit slow when you browser through the long stories. But Google reader comes with superior "Google User Interface" and unprecedented usability. So intuitive. So cool. Yahoo! made a great point with their new Yahoo Mail by integrating your email inbox and web inbox in one service. Probably even Google would eventually integrate their Gmail and Reader to one interface. Lets see.

RSS feeds have been one of the great revolutionary things of Web 2.0. I think after Email, IM, the RSS is next great thing, which happened in Internet. Sometime back I attended the presentation at a conference talking about shift in the way we deal with Internet. Instead of pulling the information out from Internet, we would be pushed with the latest information, which are of our interest. That was 2003. And within few months of that conference, technologies like RSS and ATOM came into existence. And within few months they have became so prevalent or pervasive. RSS is getting applied everywhere.

Talking about the ways RSS technologies is being applied. News Sites, Blogs, Forums, Corporate websites are few examples of where RSS is being applied. Now a days even all the social networking sites like Flickr, MySpace and email services have RSS feeds. With RSS, you can create one dashboard which you go every day for monitoring the new content or activities at different blogs, forums, news, any new photo getting uploaded at Flickr by your friends or any new job that got posted on the a particular job portal matching your criteria. In some places RSS feeds are taking over the old Email alerts, which of late has got bad reputation of spamming your mailbox. RSS is a new way to market the new features or inform the users of the new launches.