I’m giving another Google Reader another shot after the latest tweaks – originally I ended up giving up since tagging 600 feeds was just an impossible task jumping between viewing the content and the settings view, However it’s still been quite a slog

• The feed filter in Settings page is great, but it really just makes you want to have that in the main reader
• The in-reader pulldown is great for making changes, but it causes a several second refresh to go on in the subscription list. This I suppose will disappear as updates are actually implemented properly
• One of the annoyances of my add experience was a fair number of dupes – it seems to have added Atom + RSS feeds for many of these, forcing me to very annoyingly slog through, double check both feeds, remove/tag one, wait for the subscription list to refresh, and then remove/tag the other – this as you can imagine completely sucks and makes me want to stab a spoon in someone’s eye
• Search! But this is well known
• Customizing your start page really makes a huge difference. Reader still takes too long to load and it doesn’t feel like i get a good overview of what’s new (I really want an expanded list view – a list view with a couple lines of content)
• Now if there was a way to group/nest folders (I suppose I could mass select based on tags and add another tag w/ a hacked name starting w/ ‘_’ to put it first… but that’s not exactly what I want, and the clutter is very real)
• Really wishing I could tag while adding a subscription. I’ve added a dozen subscriptions already and everytime I think about the 5s I have to waste doing that
• Inline help for key commands would be really useful
• Icons/Thumbs/Cards would really make a difference in the reading experience – or color-coding, better greying out of read items, etc. – even with the left-bar hidden, the layout is too busy/cluttered and undistinguishable (just squint and look at it if you want to see how hard it is to glean information from it)
• A preference to not show post numbers would be easy to do (could be done via GM script)

Google Reader is the best feed reader out there right now, although how it’ll be accepted by the mainstream I will probably continue to be an issue (there are a lot of corners that can and probably will be rounded). Almost all of the things I listed above are fairly surface/trivial to fix. Obviously search is a little less so (I understand their pain for proper privacy / subsectioning on their search). The only other major thing I’d really love in my reading experience is a Dashboard view that could offer a more topical/buzzy view of things. It’d be great if there were link/topic-based clustering integrated both for that and at the individual post level (making it easy to follow threads/collapse redundancies). Along those lines way of automatically classifying linklog posts vs writing would be pretty sweet. Actually, I take that back, there are about half a dozen other things I can think of that would be huge opportunities for anyone aiming to do a reader, even for the “power” market that Reader has aimed at, not to mention the general public.

But until then, I think I’ve found a new feed reader (I invested a while last night and am about half-way (I hope) tagged – why oh why can’t I filter just for untagged feeds?)

Oh also, that “inbox for the web” marketing line you’re using? Sucks. I think the last thing anyone wants is yet another neverending stream of things to unbold…

Update: I’ve given up on categorization for now. I have about 450 feeds left, and with the delays in loading and picking, if I averaged 6 seconds per feed tagging it’d take me 45min of continuous tagging to organize my feeds. That’s ridiculous. I give up for now.