thoughtsignals

Goodbye, FeedDemon, hello Google Reader.

Like lots of folks, I’ve been trying out Google Reader over the past week or so. My verdict: It’s my new default feed reader.

For a long time I’ve been using FeedDemon on my home PC, synched to Newsgator for Web-only access. Before that it was FeedDemon synched to Bloglines, and before that FeedDemon by itself. But Google Reader is the first feed reader I’ve tried that seems to almost match the speed and feel of a desktop reader.

The product is still in Google Labs, which is Google’s real beta stage, so it does have occasional hiccups. Overall, though, it’s been working quite well. One feature I especially like is the ability to give individual feeds multiple tags (or folders, which are the same thing). In Newsgator, etc., a feed belonged to just one folder, unless you wanted to subscribe to it more than once. In Google Reader, though, I can tag a feed “personal” and “work,” for example. Since I want to read some stuff only at work, some only at home and some in both places, that’s a nice feature.