Google has just released a news reader (and Scoble sucks down the kool-aid), but it appears they didn’t load test it first. My first impressions? It’s excrucuatingly slow, counter intuitive, and just generally sucks the big one. I mean if the future of “Web 2.0″ is an animated Loading… dialog, then I’ll just stick with 1.0 thankyou very much.
I think Google is getting complacent. How could they release something as terminally broken as this? Surely they didn’t underestimate the interest people would have in it? I also think we have a larger problem when influential people like Robert Scoble fail to look objectively at something new from Google. Sure, they’ve done a lot of good stuff, but that doesn’t mean they can just throw any old shit at us, and expect us to love it. When that happens, we have another Microsoft on our hands.
Another interesting aspect will be the pummeling that RSS feeds all over the web are receiving as every man and his dog adds their subscriptions to Google Reader. I imagine some of the bigger weblogs are seeing a massive RSS traffic spike.
I totally agree. I have been playing with the reader and find it seriously counter intuitive. I will be sticking to Sage in Firefox for now.
Yeah, although after a bit of persistence, I’m starting to get the hang of it.
Certainly if you’re into the ‘river of news’ (all feeds mixed into one chronological list), then I guess it works OK.