Goodbye Google Reader, Hello NetVibes

Something strange crept up on me over the last several months: I slowly stopped reading blogs. Part of this was due to spending more of my limited social media budget on Seesmic, Twitter, and Facebook, which sites tend to expose a certain amount of blog content. (e.g., clicking through to new posts shared in Twitter streams.) And part of this behavioral change was driven by the incredible failings of Google Reader.

Mind you, I want to like Google products. Ubiquity is convenient. But poor interface design not only kept me from adding more feeds, but also prevented effective skimming and consumption of the content that I had added. I didn't even recognize that I had been driven away from blogs by the level of friction in the product. Or that I've been hanging on to My Yahoo! (the old, column-based version focused on large news sources) by my fingernails, because it gives me both the national and local information I'm looking for, and it gives it to me fast.

So today, I've started to move my RSS subscriptions over to NetVibes and suggest that other Google Reader users do the same. (As in a meatspace move, you'll end up weeding out the junk you don't need.) Rediscover the joy of community content! NetVibes is clean-looking, relatively frictionless for adding content, and easy to skim. Interestingly, NetVibes is not included in the default feed reader list on Firefox, but you can add by clicking on the link in this blog post. I did check out Bloglines, which also has rabid fans, but it has usability challenges similar to those of Google Reader. (Again, my focus is on efficient information organization and content consumption, not on tracking traffic trends.)

And if this thing with NetVibes works out, then I'll rethink my relationship with My Yahoo!...but not until then.

Comments

[ethan]

I've been a netvibes devotee for years, but they seem to have jumped the shark... always suggesting widgets, trying to get me to share, etc. i hate to do this, and have resisted, but I am switching over to google reader, at least for now.

[Mark]

Dear Christine,

Its about time that someone has suggested an alternative to [ Google Reader ] Google reader was a good addition in fucntionality but I guess it hasn't evolved and hasn't provided the manuvarability to the subscribers as it should ....

With the growing compitition in almost every area its nessessry to keep up with the latest weather its tempalates, scripts, plugins or addons ..... But I guess google is too busy or the project manager or [ Google Reader ] must be ...

Anyways Christine keep up the good work ... your posts are surely fun to read ...

Regards,

Mark
Editor
http://www.212articles.com

[Christine]

I'm mostly interested in web interfaces - I don't like to have too many apps open and munching CPUs. I also don't want to be overly interrupt-driven, and am more efficient personally when I 'check in' to feeds periodically, as versus have them foisted upon me as they occur. Call me a daily digest girl.

[qthrul]

I'm curious. Did you experiment with any desktop client applications such as NetNewsWire or are you primarily interested in web accessible interfaces?

I'm still clinging to Google Reader for now. A large part of this clinging stems from the Blackberry client and the ease of setting up "Share" that is published to create yet another RSS feed for later digestion.

[dominique]

Hello,

We read blog as a team and are using the platform that we have developed :-) and that we sell.

It's collaborative (i.e we use it as a team).
We collect a few hundred/thousands of blogs for our key topics. We listen to the RSS /conversations -with filters- and engage when we find it's appropriate.

We have annotation capabilities to keep track of our involvment in the conversations. This way, as an example, my teamates will be able to see that I've commented in your blog.

Thanks

[Suvendu Sahoo]

I have moved from one reader to the other over my internet life. But I am yet to find a tool which is not just a RSS reader ( Google Reader) or a Widget Platform ( as Netvibe or My Yahoo are) -but takes a holistic view of how we read , capture , manage our knowledge and add to our internet presence or share with others. I am trying to develop an ideal tool features for this purpose and here is my first attempt towards this: http://infoingenuity.blogspot.com/2008/04/personal-information-management-tool.html

[Luke Razzell]

Christine,

Finally, I've found someone else who thinks the Google Reader UI sucks! I can't understand why so many people rave about it. Sure it's fast, but there are so many wasted opportunities for good interactive design.

[matt]

Another reader/start page website to consider is Odysen at http://www.odysen.com.

A couple of the main differences include free formatting widgets (allowing you modify the size of the widget to whatever you want, helpful with large news feeds, maps, etc), and integrated news feeds (allowing to integrate multiple feeds into one widget).

[tapps]

wow. thanks for that.. netvibes is a beautiful site.. i'm going to check it out now. :-)