I'm not sure why I'm a chronic early adopter: I think it's the lure of new tools with which to fritter away my time. Del.icio.us? I was there. Flickr? Gimmie! Last.fm? Got it and scrobbling away. I consider YouTube as rubbish due to its appalling tagging tool (whilst still having an account so I can favourite Life on Mars fanvids and cat weight-lifting).

The beta-du-jour at the moment is Google Reader. I've been using bloglines for years, but am increasingly unsatisfied with its ability to mess up the feed notifications especially on those from flickr.

What is a RSS reader?
You might have noticed websites increasingly have little orange things saying RSS Feed or XML or Atom or Subscribe!, or the like. What that means is that you can sub to the page: when there's new content, you get a notification. That can be a little notifier beeping on your toolbar which, when you click on it, takes you to your RSS Reader, or it can be some sub-function of your email client (for example, on Thunderbird). You'll see them called RSS Aggregators sometimes.
Here's a definition etc from wikipedia

I need an online RSS reader though, as I like to be able to access it from anywhere in the world. And the chap's, obviously. So I want to go to a single website, log in and see which of the hundreds of websites I read has new content. That where bloglines came in, and where Google Reader seems to be taking over.

I added a cross section of feeds a couple of nights ago (some from flickr, some from blogger, some wordpress and some LJ) and it seemed to handle them happily. Having now played with the beta some more, I'm transferring all my feeds across. Then I'll run them in tamdem during March - a month with lots of travel and so lots of chances to check it on a variety of PCs and browsers - and see which one wins my loyalty. My predilication for betas means I'm leaning towards Google Reader already.

Labels: beta, geekery