Had an cool discussion about social networking with Cedric at work the other day and one of the interesting things I got out of it was that he was pretty much using the google suite for everything – word documents, email, calendar, and even google reader. I had tried google reader when it first came out, but at that point bloglines was providing so many excellent features that it wasn’t worth me to switch over. On the same day I had the discussion with Cedric I came across a video by Ed Dale in which he gives away his greatest tip for google reader. Since his tip was pretty good I decided to go back and see how the reader had progressed since my last visit and I was blown away.
Apart from the list view (a great way to get through busy rss feeds like engadget) it had some killer features like stars, share this feed and even trends of your reading habits. It lists blogs that are dead, ones that don’t have many subscribers and how many items you read in a day. What I absolutely love the most though is the friends feed. Any of my friends can choose to share an item and it instantly appears in my list as something they want me to look at (google help explains this better). Right now I’m burning my way through feeds at a rate previously unknown, with the added bonus of seeing my friends stuff. I’ve pretty much dumped bloglines now, which is a product I’ve been using for around 3-4 years if I remember correctly. Damn you google and your brilliance at software.