Tag: Google Reader

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Uncategorized

My Shared Items

I just blogged about Google Reader changes, and even though I will continue to use Google Reader, I am going to try a different workflow for “sharing” items. I picked up the domain myshareditems.com and pointed at a Posterous space. I can then use send to functionality in Google Reader to “share” items to that url. I might even try to get my previously shared items in there someday from Google Reader (you can export from the settings menu).

Who knows, but myshareditems.com could become a more central service for others to share as well if I was ambitious enough to do something like that, you never know. Anyways, it is an experiment in sharing outside of Google Reader, but not specific to a “service” (twitter, facebook, etc) but yet I don’t want it cloud up my main blog here, etc.. Will see how it works.

Categories
Blogging Product Reviews

Google Reader Changes

As anyone who uses Google Reader knows already. They have changed. They changed for the worse. Design is somewhat horrible, removed features, etc. Sharing is not there anymore. You can +1 and then Share to G+. Ability to share to an RSS feed is gone. After using Google Reader for like 4 years and reading 10k items a month, it is jarring to see things just removed. Not sure what they were thinking.

Are there alternatives? Some readers out there, yes, but most already use Google Reader for the backend. What I am looking at doing is utilizing the “Send To” functionality on a post. You can set up some default Send To’s, or a custom one. Most likely a Posterous link blog/RSS feed type thing.

Otherwise? On the Mac, iPhone, iPad – use Reeder. Not sure what “Share” does at this point in that app. On windows, stick to the browser and utilize “Send To”. You will notice it under Reader Settings, in a Send To tab. The ability to add custom send to’s is what is interesting. As long as they leave that feature in the product as well.

What are your thoughts on the changes?

Categories
Product Reviews

Flipboard for iPad, Personal Techmeme

Last week Flipboard informed me that their iPad app was ready for me to use (I have had it since day one, but their servers were overwhelmed).

The premise is that it takes your Twitter and Facebook feeds and creates personal “magazines”. It has other aggregated/curated content from around the web as well. I don’t know what the exact algorithm for figuring out what to show me is, but it seems to do ok. Right now I see it as another quick way to scan through things.

What I think would be an awesome edition, if it could handle it, is syncing my Google Reader. I want a personal “cloud” or personal “techmeme” – filter and find and combine like items. I thought maybe “The Early Edition” for iPad would do that, but it croaked on my 300 some feeds.

Some day there will be an app that does it 🙂


Categories
Geeky/Programming

The New Hipster: Going Appless

Love the iPhone, really do. But I am pretty hardcode when it comes to apps and loading things and making it “work” hard. Every once in a while some rogue app goes off the wall and starts draining battery like crazy. Usually the only thing to do is restore phone. I have had to do this, and a few other people I know have see it as well. I don’t blame the iPhone, I blame the apps. Just like windows mobile, the apps were the problem 🙂

Anyways, this time, instead of restoring my phone from backup, I just let it stay “clean”. I decided to not install any apps for as long as I can. It has been 24 hours, so that says something 🙂

But what I am doing is going back to the iPhone roots, back to 2007. Web apps. Steve Jobs himself says it is their “other”, open, unrestricted platform they support, so let’s see what it can offer.

Facebook? touch.facebook.com
Twitter? m.twitter.com
Flickr? m.flickr.com
YouTube (the HTML5 version is better than the native app!) m.youtube.com
FourSquare/Gowalla? check.in
Reeder/Google Reader? google’s mobile formatted reader site works.
Other apps? openappmkt.com
IM? meebo has a pretty good web app.

Just like regular hipsters, that drink PBR, and lose the flavor and other added benefits of drinking a less “hip” beer, you have to give some things up.. such as..

Push Notifications – not sure yet if this is a good or bad thing to give up. The current implementation just seems to annoy anyways

Background/Streaming music (Pandora/Last.fm, etc) – I did find dance.fm has a HTML5 version or something that streams directly from a web page, so I could almost say others might follow suit. I also have iPod on the device so not to worried, I don’t listen to a helluva lot of music anyways.

What else? Not sure yet, we will see how long I last. One thing I can say, there are some games that are web apps that are pretty cool, but don’t come close to the native games … yet.

Of course I will probably start installing some apps eventually, and after a while I will be back to my old app going ways 🙂

Categories
Product Reviews

Reeder, a Google Reader App for iPhone

I have tried many iPhone Google Reader apps, and nothing has come close to working well for me but the web app as a web clip shortcut. That changed this week when I checked out Reeder (http://reederapp.com/2/)

I read a ton of Google Reader (usually 10,000+ posts a month) so I need something good. Reeder has actually replaced my Web Clip Reader link on my second iPhone page as my go to Google Reader app.

If you read a lot of feeds, from Google Reader, I suggest checking out Reeder.