Un-Tech: Google Reader and RSS

This article is part of a series I’m calling “Un-Tech,” in which two non-techies (my parents) take a fresh look at some of our favorite Web applications. Their experience and perspective, I think, can help us to better understand how people understand the Web.

This week, I invited my Dad, Joey, to try Google Reader. No more instructions than that. Here’s his experience:

I love Google, and I enjoy reading, so I clicked on Google Reader with a bit of technological excitement—another step toward the cool 2.0 Life! What I got, though, didn’t exactly keep the heart pumping. Instead of great insight, thoughtful correspondence and expert analysis, I got “Customize Your Friend List.”

I didn’t know I had a friend, much less a whole list of them. But since David, my Blog Boss (hereafter referred to as BB), was the only pre-identified friend, I figured I should hit CONTINUE. I was given the option to SHARE with him/them, but I had no idea what I was going to share.

The pumping was getting slower by the minute. At least, I discovered, sharing is two-directional, so maybe this is the way that BB will reward me for my effort, in Google dollars, no doubt. Thump, thump. Now how do I get back to actually read something?

From the left menu, which is not at all intuitive, I discovered that I was already subscribed to David’s blog, so in clicking on All Items, up pops a column from March 12—where did that come from? The menu leaves me somewhat befuddled—Why do I have to refresh? Why do I care about counts? What is updating, and why should I bother? The excitement is definitely over, my balloon fully deflated.

I persevered and kept clicking, only to discover more of what I didn’t know. More terms, no explanations. More questions, no helpful hints. Finally I get to a link to “Learn more about sharing in Google.” Where have you been all my life?

Still more terms—starred, tagged, public, private—but at least there are now some clues. Stumbling through a myriad of recommended articles, I finally got it. The Google Reader is actually pretty cool.

There are some really good features here. You can relatively painlessly import your existing feeds from another reader. I even added a few new subscriptions, which was quite simple; I especially like the bundling of feeds around specific topics, which is a great way to try out some new possibilities.

You can easily share what you are reading with a friend, including your own notes if you want. And you can share just a selected portion of a page, and not the whole page or article. Maybe you can do all these things in every other reader on the web, I don’t know, as clearly I am not an expert in online readers, but I liked these features.

There were a few things missing, however, or at least I couldn’t find them. I couldn’t customize my public page, something I expected to be able to do. The drag-and-drop addition to my toolbar to simplify sharing didn’t seem to work with Safari. It seems that you can only share with someone who has a Google account—is this really necessary, or just part of expanding the Google empire?

There didn’t seem to be a way to create multiple groups for sharing with, so your one group gets everything you share instead of being able to categorize your recipients. And I had to unclick the connection with Chat, which made me feel like I was somehow dissing my friends.

The more I use Reader, the more I like it. It’s not the best design – it’s not that intuitive – they could certainly make it easier to get started. But if you hang in there, the benefits do emerge. Google seems to presume a certain familiarity with the whole process, and if you have it, you’ll probably think I’m an idiot for stumbling around as I did. But if you don’t have that mindset, you have to really want to make it work. But it does, so it’s worth the effort. The heart is pumping again.

What do you think? What are the implications of experiences like this?

Photo: jenny downing

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