Last year I began adding feeds to my Google personalized homepage (now called iGoogle). As time went on I kept adding more tabs to accommodate more and more feeds I was tracking, but now it was getting too annoying. Aside from having to constantly switch between multiple tabs, some blogs posted so often that I would miss good content if I didn’t check my each tab of my Google homepage several times per day. (iGoogle limits feed items to a maximum of the last 10 posts per source.) This became more of an issue lately after I discovered the web-goodness that is Lifehacker.
So last week I decided to give Google Reader another try. I tried it when it was first introduced and quite frankly thought it was clunky and worthless. Apparently they’ve made lots of major UI improvements since then. In less than a week I’m finding it vastly superior to the improper way I was using iGoogle, especially once I learned the “J” keyboard shortcut to quickly scroll though new posts without using the mouse. It’s definitely not a perfect product (I wish I could use keywords to filter out subjects that I just don’t care about, like anything about Macs) but since feeds are so indespensible, I think I’m well on my way towards becoming a future victim of Google Reader addiction.
