Why I Continue to Use Google Reader

So basically Scoble doesn't like Google Reader because it isn't Twitter.<p>Personally I really want "social networking features" to stay the heck out of my RSS reader, so I find his critique of that feature to be meaningless.<p>I'm a big Reader fan because it allows me to visit one site daily to read 50 occasionally updated blogs rather than visit 50 sites daily.

Does Scoble take into account that he is an edge case when he writes these things, or not? (Honest question) I get the sense that whenever he writes or complains about things he writes as though other people have the same problems he does. This is at best naive, at worst dishonest if so.

I too, continue to use Google Reader, even though I've been lamenting its deficiencies for more than two years.<p>I go into more detail in these posts [<a href="http://blog.trevorbramble.com/past/tags/googlereader" rel="nofollow">http://blog.trevorbramble.com/past/tags/googlereader</a>] where I try to glue together Reader and Yahoo Pipes because Reader can't do even basic de-duplication.<p>Despite my gripes about it, it's the best available. (Though I'm sure their lack of improvements has a lot to do with that fact.)

Both Scoble's post and this rebuttal really boil down to one thing: different people have different information consumption needs. What suits a power blogger might not suit a social-consumption junkie.<p>Me? I used to be a blogger, reading RSS feeds for 2-4 hours a day (depending how quickly I found interesting things to write about, and whether it was a catch-up day). I honestly cannot imagine replicating that level of information wired-ness with a simple Twitter list. However! I'm now far more casual in my news consumption and Twitter lists are the perfect way for me to get a handful of headlines from a handful of folks I trust.<p>I haven't even set up a Twitter list just yet - only a custom group in TweetDeck. I manually visit four or five sites when I get the time, and get my news that way. I even set up these sites in Google Reader, but it's not all that efficient when you've only got a handful - I actually prefer to visit the sites themselves, as I can see things like Lifehacker's recommended stories more easily there. HN is the main place I go to for news outwith these sources.

I personally stopped using Greader, not because it's a bas tool. It's a great tool, but I stopped using it after realizing that google knew everything about me, and that I was totally dependant on them. So now I use tt-rss, it's a Greader clone (just better) that I host on my box. And I'm now Google-free :)

Is there a better online RSS reader than Google Reader?

I like using Google Reader on the iPhone, it works better than any of the dedicated apps I've tried and I don't have to reconfigure a new app with my list of feeds.<p>I also don't think Twitter is ever going to replace RSS feeds. RSS covers in-depth information from sources that I follow while twitter may occasionally direct me to the same sources that isn't its primary use.

From Scoble post about GReader: &#62;&#62; 3. It makes me feel guilty. I have 1,000 unread items. Twitter doesn’t tell me that.<p>Actually, I happen to agree with this point. The feed reader tracks what is read and what is unread, and that can develop into a unhealthy habit to check "what is new" and try to "clear the feeds" from unread items several times per day.<p>Recently, my experience is that GReader (or any feed reader in general) tends to consume quite a lot of time, even too much time. So like Scoble, I am also looking for a better solution, which might include twitter (but twitter lists isn't it for me).

What I need in a reader (I haven't found it) is the ability to say: this list of subjects is what I want to read about. Period. I don't want to be the filter. In an always-on reader, I want fine-grained tunable filters. Source level isn't good enough: it has to be at the post level. Or better.<p>Sometimes I want to drink from the firehose. Then I run to an accumulator like popurls.com. But life's too short to be scrolling for a half hour. As for socializing: I do that at the club.

The iPhone version of Reader is very annoying because it refreshes the page constantly when I come back to it. Thus I lose the place or folder where I was at.