Google Online RSS Reader: Worst Than Having Nothing At All

Google just added RSS subscription/reading features to its personalized Google homepage. The news comes from Micropersuasion.

My first feeling was that this is excellent, another stone towards getting RSS in to mainstream.

But looking at how Google implemented these RSS features, I wonder if it weren’t better for them to wait another month or so to bring us at least a usable online RSS aggregator.

First of all, finding the “Subscribe to RSS Feature” is an art by itself, since Google decided to hide the subscribe feature under a “Create a Section” link. Why can’t we just abide by some standards to make things easier on users?

Second, all that Google’s RSS functionality allows you to do is subscribe to feeds, which are then placed on your homepage as headlines, with the ability to select the number of headlines displayed, but no ability to see the descriptions or even full-text content.

If this is how Google plans to contend on the RSS market, they might as well not do it at all. The very least I would expect from them are feed filtering and merging capabilities.

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