Google Reader improves

15 Oct 2005

Looks as though they’ve just implemented a “no unread items” case, which means it won’t persist in keeping your last item to be read in an unread state until it aggregates more data. Not a problem for people with massive feed collections, but mine is of a relatively austere disposition. This’ll make it a whole heap more pleasant for people like me, who just hate seeing “unread” items sitting there.

I wonder if this means they’ve improved their handling of “invalid” feeds? I had one that was causing problems (actually, it was Michael’s comments feed), and making the reader throw errors only resolved by logging out then back in (just like a desktop app… pffft!), but I asked if he could fix that and he did, so that problem disappeared. The only other problem I’ve found is in deleting feeds… I get the ABC TV feed to my desktop feed reader, but Google’s web app really isn’t suited to handling that kind of information, because of the chronologically-dependent default mode of displaying information. There’s an anachronistic display mechanism in which you can select feeds, but this isn’t the default view and it’s not terribly intuitive.

What would be nice to see is an RSS-feed from the RSS aggregator that simply sends the state of read/unread. This would mean Google-enabled RSS tray apps could work, which would be wonderful… like the Gmail tray notification app at present, but for Google Reader instead. Oh, and they really should come up with a less ubiquitous and more interesting name for Reader at some point… it’s almost frustrating having to type it as a proper noun just to make it clearly understood. I mean, I’d do this regardless, but it’s annoying not to be able to slip up occasionally (or, specifically, on MSN where I rarely bother with capitalisation, unless I’m trying to make a point) without my meaning tending more towards the obscure than is normal.

For example, compare these two headlines:

“Google reader improves”
“Google Reader improves”

In the first, the agent is a Google reader; or,–and herein lies the confusion– a reader of Google, presumably a human. In the second, it’s clear that I’m talking about Google’s product, Reader.

Importantly, both are correct usages (well, correct in mangled-sentence-headline-grammar), though only one acknowledges that “Reader” is the name of a product (hence, a proper noun), as opposed to a regular noun: that is, Google’s product that (verb) reads feeds.

Even “syndicator” would be a better name, in terms of usage (though, based on much of the quality of writing on the web, it would be spelt incorrectly more often than not, irrespective of capitalisation in recognition of its proper noun status!). Was “Reader” really the best they could come up with?

Aside: it has occurred to me I don’t have a category for this post. It belongs under Geek as much as general Nerdery, but no such category exists and I can’t be bothered to create one. What I potentially could be bothered to do is ditch categories altogether and move to tagging, instead. On the post-first-bout-of-exams todo-list.