Ready for another haiku?

Google’s new Reader –
feeds, like email, are better
when sorted by source.

Who do I think I am… Matsuo Basho? Far from it! Still, this is fun.

So, I tried the Google Reader when it first came out and, well, was extremely underwhelmed. I’m a fan of Google’s search, Google Maps, GMail, Google Calendar, etc. but their Reader did not interest me at all. With the release of their new Reader, I’ve taken another look (and things are very different this time around).

The reader is so good, in fact, that I’m moving from Thunderbird (which I use for RSS) to Google Reader. This will probably have a ripple effect because I stopped using my old mail reader, Evolution, so that I could use Thunderbird‘s RSS reader (Evolution doesn’t, to my knowledge, have an RSS component).

I’m going to give it another week or so (just to make sure), but can imagine moving back to Evolution for my email in the very near future. I should say I have nothing against Thunderbird. This decision is also, in part, because my place of work is installing an Exchange server sometime soon.

One of the things that I’ve never liked about web-based news readers is that they give into the endless stream of feeds without trying to provide any organization (e.g., sources are just ‘tags’ on a post). The new Google Reader gets it right, in my opinion, by treating feeds more like email. The source is more important than anything else when I consider whether I want to read something; having my feeds categorized by source makes my life much easier.

Yes, currency is important but I’d rather read an older post of a blog I value highly than the most recent post from a blog in which I’m just mildly interested. Hooray Google for getting this right… it makes all the difference.

Other nice features include the ability to auto-mark something as read and to be able to star something as important. It is not clear to me how long starred posts remain available to me (it would be nice if they were available for as long as I want them to be — I’d give up a little of my Gmail disk space for that).

One thing the new Reader doesn’t have (which would be nice) is the ability to filter feeds. There are one or two feeds that I have a filter on so that I only see the relevant (to me) posts. I haven’t found this feature yet with Google Reader (Thunderbird does have this option). This aside, I’ve been wanting to move more towards a web-based RSS reader and I think, now, I’ve found one that works for me…