My Pet Peeves About Google Reader
June 17th, 2007I didn’t really catch on to feeding on RSS content in a big way until Google Reader appeared on the scene. I tried NetNewsWire for modest while on OS X, but the sheer multiplicity of machines that I would be on while at school would have a deleterious effect on the temporal nature of the news feeds, making news stale when I’d end up accessing feeds at my desk at the end of the day. With Google Reader, however, this scenario changed, and my feeds were available online in a consistent format across machines and platforms. Google Reader updated its display format some time back, and improved usability in a big way.
That said, there are still some issues that need to be ironed out. Google Reader is a Google Labs product for now, which means its not even in true beta yet - however, we have all come to expect Google to set a much higher standard for its offerings, making these following items my pet peeves about Google Reader.
No Search
This is such an obvious missing feature for Google, that I’m pretty sure it is being worked on at the moment and should be arriving any time now.
Total Unread Count Bug
I’m not sure if there are many people who see this, but I always am shown a non-zero All Items count in the top left corner, even if the feeds display shows no new feed items - it’s currently sitting at 27. Moreover, this number keeps incrementing by single-digit values every few days. I am an information junkie - leaving stuff unread makes me fidgety 
While on this topic, I’d also like for the count to show something other than ‘100+’ when I do have unread content. An absolute count would be alright. My feeds are neatly segregated into folders with individual counts, however - therefore this count serves me no true purpose, so I’ll let it go.
No Multiple Selections, Gmail Style
Gmail has quite a few ways of letting me select messages, in both sequential and random ways, and then letting me either label, archive, or perform other actions. Porting this to Google Reader would be a very nice feature to have, especially since the nature of content and the possibilities of operations are quite congruent for both applications.
No Resizable Left Panel
With the kind of javascripting that Google applies to their applications, a resizable sidebar would not be too hard to implement. This feature would come in quite handy, and let the user optimize the reading column width if their RSS feed titles are quite short. Especially on tiny notebook screens. Conversely, really long feed titles could be viewed without truncation - although personally, I end up renaming my feed titles to a custom, shorter name if they exceed a certain length.
Google Reader recently updated their Email format for sending out feed items to friends. Earlier, the feed item content would be mashed into a blotch of unseparated text within the email window, forcing manual line breaks to make the email readable. The new format however, places nicer Gmail-style markers flanking the feed item content in html format. That is one less peeve for me, and I’m glad! I do end up sending a lot of email from within Reader - quite a few of my friends have yet to be convinced of the purposes of RSS feed syndication.
