With such evangelism by the likes of
Robert Scoble and
Kevin Tofel you can see why. In fact, Google reader has gone from nowhere in November to being the top referrer in my stats for December - tells you something.
So, I thought I'd give it a spin.
I normally keep my 20 favourite feeds in Outlook 2007 using the built in RSS functionality and then have my full list in Bloglines. Why only 20 in Outlook? Well, I'm still experiencing the problems with feeds getting "removed" from my Outlook profile when there are more than about 20 in the list .
For some reason Google Reader won't import my old OPML that was exported from Outlook so I exported my feeds from Bloglines and imported that OPML in instead.
First impressions:
I don't know what it is but I just don't like the interface - I don't know why but it just doesn't feel comfortable. One of the main reasons people tend to like Google Reader is the keyboard shortcuts - especially using J + K for Next Post/Previous post. To me it just feels back to front - I keep hitting K when I should be hitting J.
Perhaps I need to spend a bit more time with it and muck about with the view settings.
The other thing I've noticed is that it seems to be a lot slower to update than Bloglines. In the time I had 12 updates on Bloglines I had only received 1 on Google Reader.
Maybe I just need to get used to the platform but, so far, I'm unimpressed.
UPDATE:
Just for reference purposes, the stats for December (up until yesterday) were
1st - Google Reader - 132 referrals
2nd - Live Search results - 126