Creeva’s World 2.0

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Google reader, I love you — I also hate you.    You are like a bad rela­tion­ship that I can’t break.   You save me so much time on the web since I no longer have to jump from site to site.   You how­ever do not give me any good rea­son to use you and save items.    You are a cruel mis­tress who mis­treats me and wastes my time.   Here are things you need to work on.

The first and only thing you need to work is how saved “starred” items work within your inter­face.     I have been try­ing to clear out “starred” items since the list was get­ting unwieldy for me.  Let’s start off by how I use starred items.   I use it to save per­son­ally inter­est­ing sto­ries that are not rel­e­vant enough for me to share the story.   They are also too mun­dane in most occa­sions to e-mail to myself.    Yes I know this is in essence using you as a book­mark­ing ser­vice — a ser­vice mind you that Google has not offi­cially ven­tured into.  You are designed to dis­play infor­ma­tion rapidly from mul­ti­ple sources and your saved items is really an after thought.    Or it it?

You attempted to rec­tify some of this with tag­ging, the first prob­lem I have with tag­ging — is other then by using search I can not find a way to find the “fold­ers” made by cre­at­ing a tag.   It’s all fine and great that we can cre­ate tags, but if you can not quickly get to them, what is the point other then to give me hope.   Maybe I’m just retarded when it comes to tags, but tags do not answer the sec­ond prob­lem I have, only the book­mark­ing aspect (and answers it extremely poorly).

The sec­ond thing I use you for is sav­ing sto­ries that I can come back and read later.   I get in on Mon­day morn­ing and I have 367 unread items that have shown up since Sun­day when I cleared them out.   I don’t have time to leisurely read the sto­ries, instead I go through and star the ones I want to come back and read later.   By Fri­day I have over one thou­sand story I want to come back and read, but who has the time or effort.  The other day to get back to my old­est starred items it took me over 5 min­utes of scrolling all the way down and wait­ing for you to load.   There has to be another way.

A few meth­ods I came up to help the starred over­load issue:

Saved feed items by date — if you could cat­e­go­rize items in folder by month/week/or even day that you starred them that would be fan­tas­tic and save on a hell of a lot of scrolling.

Starred item by feed it came from — by being able to fil­ter our starred items by source feed would also be awe­some.   This would allow me to quickly dig into the sto­ries I want to read when I sit down.   Some­times I don’t feel like going back to starred items from feeds 6, 5, 89, 90, etc. — when all I want to do is read sto­ries from feed78.     There should be a sim­pler way to do this then forc­ing me to tag or search.  I can set up labels and see them on the left in Gmail, why is the reader data so different?

Well next week I plan to pub­lish arti­cles of some of the saved links I have saved by sub­ject.   I’ve been work­ing hard, but like they say you go two steps for­ward and you end three steps back.     We’ll see how it goes.

Love,

Creeva