Manage your RSS feeds with Google Reader

Bookmarking sites like del.icio.us give you the ability to bookmark your favorite websites and use tagging to make it easier to find them later on. Since the bookmarks are stored on the servers at del.icio.us instead of on your local PC you can bookmark a website while you’re logged onto one PC and retrieve those bookmarks while you’re looged on at a differnet PC. For people who end up accessing the internet from a number of different PC’s (like at work, at school, and at home) using a service like del.icio.us is much easier than trying to keep your list of local bookmarks synchronized across all of your comptuers. But what if you also have a long list of RSS feeds that you want to keep tabs on across your many computers?

The new Google Reader allows you to do the same thing with your RSS feeds that del.icio.us allows you to do with your bookmarks. Since it’s browser-based you can access and modify your feeds from any internet-connected computer. It uses the same type of minimalist user interface that other Google applications use, although there is a sprinkling of AJAX thrown in that makes the service seem more like a desktop application than a web-based application.

Adding your feeds to Google Reader is straightforward. You can add feeds by entering their URLs or, if you’re already using a different RSS reader, you can import the your feeds into Google Reader (as long as your other RSS reader can export its list of feeds as an industry-standard opml.xml file).

Let’s take a closer look at what you’ll see when you use Google Reader.

In order to use Google Reader you’ll have to have a Google account. If you already have a account with one of Google’s other properties (Gmail, Google Groups, Google Alerts, etc.) you can use that same account for Google Reader. Once you’ve connected to your Google Reader account you’ll see your list of favorite RSS feeds, including a count of the number of articles within each feed that you haven’t seen yet. You can put your feeds into different folders to make them easier to manage.

There are two options you can use to control how your feed’s articles are displayed. The “list view” shows each article from a feed on its own line and includes the title of the article and as much of the full text as it can fit on one line. Clicking on a given line will switch to “expanded view” which enlarges the summary to show a few more lines of the article, as well as additional options for handling the article.

The “expanded view” shows all of the articles already expanded.

You can configure Google Reader to show you only new articles (articles that it knows you haven’t seen yet) or to show you all articles for a given feed. You can also “star” an article which adds it to a special “Starred items” group so that you can see all of your favorite article links in one place. That makes it possible to quickly scan a summary of your favorite feeds, mark the articles that sound interesting, and then read the full text of those articles later on (possibly even on a different computer).

Like del.icio.us, Shadows, Flickr, and all of the other “social” sites, Google Reader lets you add additional tags to each article. By default an article’s summary gets tagged with the name of the folder which includes the feed. For example, feeds that are in my “tech” folder get a “tech” tag added automatically, but I can add additional tags later on if I want to categorize the article even more. Your list of tags shows up as a set of quasi-folders after your list of “real” folders. The only real difference between folders and tags is that incoming articles get tagged with the name of the folder containing the feed automatically — you’ll have to add any additional tags manually.

Google Reader also lets you share some of your articles with other people. Click on the “Share” button and the article will also show up in your “Shared Items” folder. Google Reader gives you a special URL that points to your Shared Items folder so anyone who knows that URL can see the articles you’ve marked as Shared. You can even display your Shared articles on your website or in your blog.

If you subscribe to a number of different RSS feeds and you use a number of different computers you should do yourself a favor check out Google Reader. It just may be the RSS reader you’ve been looking for.

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