Google Reader - Cut The Time You Spend Reading On The Web

Google Reader - Home view (click to enlarge)

 I spend a lot of time each day reading online. Chances are, you do as well. Blogs, new sites, other review sites; much of it to keep on top of things for this site, some of it just for pleasure (although the two often dovetail.) My morning starts with visiting 25-30 sites, checking to see what's new and exciting. Then the same "rounds" several times during the day, not to mention additional sites that I'd get lead to through my regular stops.

I finally decided that I was spending too much time wading through articles that I didn't really need to look at - and doing too much physical scrolling to get to the ones I did want to read.

Eventually I decided that I needed to start subscribing to RSS feeds. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has been around for a little over 10 years, and is available for most Web sites. (One exception is Facebook personal pages, although it's available for business, fan, and group pages.) Maybe the best way to describe what RSS does is to say that instead of your going to a Web site, the Web site is brought to you by RSS. An RSS reader program will do the grunt work of going out and retrieving the newest articles or blog entries from the sites you select and aggregate them in one common interface for you.

There's no shortage of desktop RSS reader programs out there, all of them with pretty much the same range of options, and most of them doing a good job of retrieving and aggregating RSS feeds. I've tried quite a few of them over the years, but have never found one I've continued to use for any length of time.

A few months ago I decided to give Google's Reader a try. Why not, since like Docs and Voice and Calendar and Photos it's included in a Gmail account. And it features Google's trademark simple, easy, no-frills interface. Since I literally always have Gmail open in a browser (I used Google Voice as my "landline" phone), it made sense to use Reader rather than a separate desktop application or one of the other Web-based RSS readers. And I have to say that it's become my favorite part of the Google cloud apps built into Gmail.

And of course, one of the best features about Google Reader is that it's available anywhere you can log into your Gmail account. At work, at home, on a desktop, laptop, tablet, cell phone or other mobile device - if you can log in to Gmail, you can read your feeds.

Google Reader - List View (click to enlarge)

Setting up feeds is very easy - just click the "Add a subscription" button at the top, enter the site URL, and Reader will immediately start pulling articles and making them available to you. You can quickly set up folders to group your different feeds in some sort of logical order - say a News folder, a Blog folder, and so on. And you can view you feeds a couple of different ways - either a List view (which just shows headlines) or an Expanded view which shows a snippet of the original article. You can then click on the headline to open the site in a new browser tab, or click "Preview" at the bottom of the article in Reader and it will load the original page right there.

Google Reader - Expanded View (click to enlarge)

Other options include "starring" an article (save it), adding notes, sharing it with someone via email, or adding special tags to help you find the article later.

I don't have any hard data to back it up, but I would estimate that Reader has cut the amount of time I spend reading on the Web in half. Well, maybe not the actual reading time, but it certainly does away with the actual physical work of clicking bookmarks, loading a site, and scrolling through articles I'm not interested in. Some of the sites I read may publish 20 or 30 or more articles a day, only a few of which I want to read - I check Reader two or three times a day, and it's not unusual for me to have several hundred articles waiting - and using Reader (which I like to think of as giving me a "table of contents" to a site) lets me zero in on the articles I want to read.

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