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Tools You Can’t Live Without: Google Reader
By micah | July 18, 2007
Here it is, our final installment of Tools You Can’t Live Without. Just a reminder, these are Web 2.0 applications that are designed to make you more productive in your everyday life. This week we’ll be highlighting Google Reader. Be sure to check out our reviews of Remember the Milk and Google Notebook.
So what is Google Reader? Google Reader is the ultimate rss reader for people without a lot of time on their hands. The beautiful and highly-responsive user interface not only makes Google Reader a pleasure to look at, but also a dream to use. Here are some of the features that make Google Reader a tool you can’t live without.
- Shared Items. This is a great way to share your favorite articles with your friends. In addition to that, I have found this feature to be extremely useful on blogs. You can generate a code snippet that you can insert into your sidebar or wherever you like. Your sidebar will be automatically updated whenever you choose to share a new article. Check it out in action here.
- Bookmarklets. As I have mentioned before, accessibility is extremely important to me in the apps I use everyday. Google Reader does an amazing job of adding new rss feeds to your reader through bookmarklets. This is a little javascript snippet that can be saved to your bookmark folder or bar. Whenever you are viewing any site with an rss feed, you can click this bookmarklet and like magic that site’s rss feed appears in your Google Reader.
- Keyboard Shortcuts. This is the biggest reason Google Reader is so productive. You can use shortcuts to navigate through feeds, open feeds, and share items with ease. In result, you can cram as much information into your head as you possibly can in as little amount of time.
- Trends. Trends are the icing on the cake that is Google Reader. This is where you can view stats on all your feeds that you read. You can see which sites put out the most feeds and what percentage of feeds you actually read. You can even see how many feeds you’ve read within the last 30 days by day, time of day, or day of week. For me, this is the perfect way to find those feeds that are just wasting my time and need to be un-subscribed.
If you are a big rss feed reader and haven’t tried Google Reader yet, what are you waiting for? All you need is a Gmail account which you can get here. If you have never used an rss reader, here’s your perfect chance to get started. Start collaborating all your news sources today with Google Reader.
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