Comments on: Just How Big Is Google Reader?

By: Wise Bread

Wise Bread — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 05:27:11 +0000

I notice a lot of commenters use NetVibes, but no one has mentioned the speed. I tried NetVibes for the last couple of months in ‘06, but just couldn’t get over how s-l-o-w it was. Was that just me?

GR not only loads faster, but I actually get through the feeds faster using the keyboard shortcuts.

As for desktop readers, I’m done with them. Anything that is locked down to one computer — browser bookmarks, POP mail, feed subscriptions — forget about it. It’s just too damn painful to maintain the same configs across 3 computers plus a couple of mobile devices. Del.icio.us and GR all the way!

By: Blogrolle.net : Feedreader-Nutzung

Blogrolle.net : Feedreader-Nutzung — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:21:06 +0000

[...] Techcrunch macht sich Gedanken zur Popularität des Google Readers: We’ve noticed a significant jump in referrals from Google Reader, though. Enough to suggest that it is as large or larger than Bloglines already. [...]

By: 3Monkeys

3Monkeys — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:13:16 +0000

I just switched over to Google Reader. I had been using RSS Ticker in Firefox for quite sometime, but wanted to organize my feeds better. Overall the experience has been great so far. I’ve had a few complaints, however.

By: Jonathan Orlev

Jonathan Orlev — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 11:16:24 +0000

As long as Google Reader does not have both:
1. Build in search option
2. The option to get prompts when a new feeds from a given subscription arrives via email and instant messaging.

I really don’t think it is a good choice for me and many others.

By: Phil

Phil — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 22:50:59 +0000

One thing that may be skewing the results slightly in Bloglines’ favour is that Bloglines uses a frameset; the initial load is 3 pages views, and the lefthand frame reloads itself periodically, so it likely generates more total page views than Google Reader for the same amount of browsing activity.

By: Rock

Rock — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 20:07:43 +0000

I finally made the full jump to Google Reader after I noticed Bloglines consistently breaking down (in the last 3 months) in the most important aspect of RSS feeds, reliable updates. This was across all of my 100+ feeds so I knew it wasn’t a fluke from the sites themselves. You’d think after doing it for 4 years they would have things like that hammered out, but apparently not. Combine that with the fact that they’ve been treading water for the longest time, finally have a real competitor with the Google Reader redesign and you’ve made a defector from a 3+ year bloglines user.

By: Christopher Johnston

Christopher Johnston — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:29:01 +0000

I discovered RSS feeds by using Google Reader and I personally wouldn’t switch. I also love that Firefox will ask me if I want to add a feed to Google Reader when click on a feed url.
The main reason I wouldn’t switch though is that I don’t want to learn a new product. I think that this may also be the one reason it’s lagging behind.

By: jon

jon — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:28:49 +0000

Is there any reason to assume that anyone outside of Google can tell us how many people are using the reader?

It’s not like each GoogleReader instance is a client which connects to the site everytime someone logs into the app to read some rss feeds.

I’m not any kind of expert on how it works, of course, but I’m sure they cache all kinds of stuff on their end.

Let’s say there are 1000 people on GoogleReader who subscribe to a given blog. It’s not like that blog is going to receive significantly more traffic from GoogleReader than if they had just 10 readers. Or 100,000, for that matter.

By: Lelia Katherine Thomas

Lelia Katherine Thomas — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 14:46:28 +0000

I read this via Google Reader. I only recently switch to it, but I find it so intuitive that I don’t find myself switching to something else anytime soon. I tried doing the personal software thing for a while, but that bombed for me. I like having something online that I can access anywhere.

By: Stetson Roller

Stetson Roller — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 08:53:31 +0000

I prefer reading it with firefox’s inbuilt and there’s no real way to track users using FIrefox, which is why I prefer it.

By: Django Bliss

Django Bliss — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 06:24:38 +0000

I switched to it about 1 year ago… maybe longer. It wasn’t the best back then, but their upgrades have grow to fit the needs I have for an RSS reader. I wouldn’t stand for a desktop reader which would require me to import my list from computer to computer I’m on. And it allows easy integration with the other Googly services that I’m already using.

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 05:22:35 +0000

I used google homepage for RSS feeds, but when I found out about netvibes, I haven’t used google reader since. Netvibes is so much better than google’s homepage. Google’s isn’t nearly as user friendly.

By: Don

Don — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 05:12:19 +0000

I’ve switched over to Google Reader. I feel it’s the best web based RSS reader out there. I don’t have to worry about installing some third party software on my computer and worry about it crashing.

Use it, love it

Don

By: Bob

Bob — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 05:02:12 +0000

It’s slow to me, the reason I find Google is rushing products to market without Interoperability.

By: xxdesmus

xxdesmus — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 04:25:56 +0000

It will take something truly ground breaking to get me to switch from Netvibes. It does EXACTLY what I want.

By: James Clark

James Clark — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 03:53:28 +0000

I switched to Google Reader from NewsFire. I love the “share” feature in Google reader. It helps with our team to divide and conquer staying current.

I wish it was a better podcatcher though. I love how NewsFire works as and syncs with iTunes.

By: Chris Messina

Chris Messina — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:56:06 +0000

Just a point of clarification on the Rojo spike… It seems as though Sep 18 they changed their robots.txt file from this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To this:

User-agent: MSIECrawler Disallow: /

So it’s important to put it into perspective what content is actually showing on these sites — and what’s driving traffic — stuff that’s public or stuff that’s private or hidden away from bots.

Bloglines, meanwhile, is very generous:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /preview

Google Reader, except where it comes to XHTML output, is not.

By: Nick Gonzalez

Nick Gonzalez — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:05:05 +0000

@ flash ripper - I use omea. has some shortcomings but seems to handle filtering and the massive amounts of feeds well.

By: joey

joey — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:23:45 +0000

I’m really hoping that google reader will soon support authentication for those feeds that require credentials.

By: Janette Toral

Janette Toral — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:08:52 +0000

I use Bloglines as a primary tool. However, I’m using Google Reader as an investment for my existing blogs as it allows me to share and tag keywords for each entry. I’d like to believe that it can also be helpful in terms of attaining better search engine visibility - once it gets to be much more integrated with the Google search engine. (of course, that idea may not be valid at all)

By: Dave Conrey

Dave Conrey — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:16:41 +0000

I found this post as I was writing my own link post. Oddly, I’m not using Google Reader, but I’ve been thinking about switching from Bloglines to Google because I do so much other stuff inside Google. Keep it in the family, right?

By: Gregor J. Rothfuss

Gregor J. Rothfuss — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:14:57 +0000

I switched to Google Reader because it is faster than my local application.

By: Michael Arrington

Michael Arrington — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:10:51 +0000

Matthew - even though it’s non-obvious, firefox reader is actually a desktop reader, there’s no web site.

By: Jess

Jess — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:28:12 +0000

I use Netvibes as my homepage and RSS source and I do not like the fact that I have to refresh Google Reader to see my latest feeds. I just always go back to my Netvibes tab and know exactly how many new feeds I have, without having to hit refresh. It may seem trivial, but efficiency is everything to me. I would really like the Google homepage and reader to be my main online hub, but it’s just not customizable enough to really fit my needs quite yet.

By: Christoph H.

Christoph H. — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 21:20:09 +0000

In the first days of the Google Reader, I checked it out and didn’t like it. I decided to keep on using Bloglines, which is still a great tool. But since Google released the big update, I prefer the Reader. The shortcuts, the layout and many other things are well done. Additionally, it’s quite fine to have online one login for email, calendar, rss and all the other products by google I’m using.