Who said Google Reader isn’t fast?

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I’ve read through more than 1,000 items so far today. I find it interesting that some think it’s slow. It hesitates once every 20 feeds, but I hit “J, J, J, J” as fast as I can read and it keeps up. But, the best part of Google Reader is that I can share my favorite items with you. I’ve read 1016 items so you don’t have to.

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Published by Robert Scoble

I help entrepreneurs build their technology business' story, help with getting ready for investors, with other launch plans, and many other strategic things that can help your new startup. Call to talk: +1-425-205-1921 (text first).

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54 thoughts on “Who said Google Reader isn’t fast?”

  1. Mr. Scoble – Curious… has Google Reader changed how you consume feeds? Now that you travel (presumably) more than at Microsoft… wonder if that time you’re not connected now goes into email. Suspect not… but still… I find the airplane time is awesome for me to catch up on my feeds in Safari. Couldn’t do that with Google Reader (I don’t think so, anyway).

    PS – Fun Mac v. Vista videos. Lots of fighting spirit in that crowd 🙂

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  2. Mr. Scoble – Curious… has Google Reader changed how you consume feeds? Now that you travel (presumably) more than at Microsoft… wonder if that time you’re not connected now goes into email. Suspect not… but still… I find the airplane time is awesome for me to catch up on my feeds in Safari. Couldn’t do that with Google Reader (I don’t think so, anyway).

    PS – Fun Mac v. Vista videos. Lots of fighting spirit in that crowd 🙂

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  9. I LOVE Google Reader. The keyboard shortcuts (so far I only use J, thanks to your tip from the other post!) are nice, and what I REALLY love is the NEXT link you can put in your faces, and just click through your items without having to go to reader.google.com at all!

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  10. I LOVE Google Reader. The keyboard shortcuts (so far I only use J, thanks to your tip from the other post!) are nice, and what I REALLY love is the NEXT link you can put in your faces, and just click through your items without having to go to reader.google.com at all!

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  11. “I’ve read 1016 items so you don’t have to.” Crap Robert, whats the fun in that, I know several people would prefer a processed version of RSS feeds, but I for one, enjoy going through my 210 feeds. it is amazing what is out there in the blogoshere.
    I was subscribed to your link blog, but then I noticed that I already subscribe to alot of the same feeds.

    Your doing a fine job and I appreciate your doing ‘Pissing off the blogoshere, reading the feeds, and any other stuff’ for me, but frankly I like to do it myself.

    Guy

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  12. “I’ve read 1016 items so you don’t have to.” Crap Robert, whats the fun in that, I know several people would prefer a processed version of RSS feeds, but I for one, enjoy going through my 210 feeds. it is amazing what is out there in the blogoshere.
    I was subscribed to your link blog, but then I noticed that I already subscribe to alot of the same feeds.

    Your doing a fine job and I appreciate your doing ‘Pissing off the blogoshere, reading the feeds, and any other stuff’ for me, but frankly I like to do it myself.

    Guy

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  16. You’ve gone through 1000 items this morning? That’s what around 10 seconds each? I’m not sure how you can get any sort of depth of knowledge with that. And I bring that up from my own experience of scrolling through stories that quickly.

    One thing that google reader could improve on is to have a way to remove duplicate or similar stories. I’m constantly getting the same story repackaged 5 times on different websites.

    Also I wish there was a way to ignore a certain topic. For example when Adobe released PDF to some standards body there was 2 dozen stories on it. I just need to read one.

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  17. You’ve gone through 1000 items this morning? That’s what around 10 seconds each? I’m not sure how you can get any sort of depth of knowledge with that. And I bring that up from my own experience of scrolling through stories that quickly.

    One thing that google reader could improve on is to have a way to remove duplicate or similar stories. I’m constantly getting the same story repackaged 5 times on different websites.

    Also I wish there was a way to ignore a certain topic. For example when Adobe released PDF to some standards body there was 2 dozen stories on it. I just need to read one.

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  20. My tips:

    Select the Expanded preview mode, so you can scan more than just a headline when pressing the Page Down key.

    Press the U key, to increase the number of articles you can scan at a time.

    Press the V key whenever Google Reader highlights a new article you want to read in depth — but only after configuring your web browser so that new windows instead open as new tabs in the background.

    When you reach the dreaded “loading 20 more items” lag, just control-tab to the article that have opened as additional tabs.

    By the time you’re done reading them, control-tab back to get back to Google Reader, and another 20 items will be ready for you to read.

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  21. My tips:

    Select the Expanded preview mode, so you can scan more than just a headline when pressing the Page Down key.

    Press the U key, to increase the number of articles you can scan at a time.

    Press the V key whenever Google Reader highlights a new article you want to read in depth — but only after configuring your web browser so that new windows instead open as new tabs in the background.

    When you reach the dreaded “loading 20 more items” lag, just control-tab to the article that have opened as additional tabs.

    By the time you’re done reading them, control-tab back to get back to Google Reader, and another 20 items will be ready for you to read.

    Like

  22. I was surprised how much faster I can read feeds in Google Reader after I started to use magic “J” and “K” keyboard shortcuts. Thanks goes for Robert Scoble who mentioned them so much, so I learned about them without even reading some Google Reader help pages.

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  23. I was surprised how much faster I can read feeds in Google Reader after I started to use magic “J” and “K” keyboard shortcuts. Thanks goes for Robert Scoble who mentioned them so much, so I learned about them without even reading some Google Reader help pages.

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  24. Google Reader is great. I have found over the years that I am using more and more of their services. I use Gmail, Reader, Bookmarks, and I have been using a lot of their API services as well.

    Google Analytics is cool to for people that don’t want to invest money into traffic analysis programs for their sites.

    Overall, I am extremely satisfied with Google. For many years in the early to mid 90’s I was a Yahoo junkie… and it sure is wild to see how much Yahoo has changed and lost their viewer base over the past few years.

    Windows Live is pretty cool… that seems to be the only thing that can compete with Google. And I am glad to see it, because without competition, people like us can’t experience anything good. When two people are competing to be the best, the results are excellent products and services for the consumer.

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  25. Google Reader is great. I have found over the years that I am using more and more of their services. I use Gmail, Reader, Bookmarks, and I have been using a lot of their API services as well.

    Google Analytics is cool to for people that don’t want to invest money into traffic analysis programs for their sites.

    Overall, I am extremely satisfied with Google. For many years in the early to mid 90’s I was a Yahoo junkie… and it sure is wild to see how much Yahoo has changed and lost their viewer base over the past few years.

    Windows Live is pretty cool… that seems to be the only thing that can compete with Google. And I am glad to see it, because without competition, people like us can’t experience anything good. When two people are competing to be the best, the results are excellent products and services for the consumer.

    Like

  26. I wonder how many of the people who complain about the speed of Google Reader leave it open for a few days? If I do that it becomes unusably slow after a couple, at least on IE7. But as long as I religiously shut it down once a day it seems fine.

    Some feeds do seem to update slow, but that may be the feed and not Reader itself. I should install another reader and compare.

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  27. I wonder how many of the people who complain about the speed of Google Reader leave it open for a few days? If I do that it becomes unusably slow after a couple, at least on IE7. But as long as I religiously shut it down once a day it seems fine.

    Some feeds do seem to update slow, but that may be the feed and not Reader itself. I should install another reader and compare.

    Like

  28. I agree.. After reading about your experience with GR, I have now switched. Not only am I going through items much faster, I find I am able to collate them much better for future use (i.e. tagging). I had previously used Newsgator and find GR to be far superior for mass reading. I also have really enjoyed the trends/ stats.

    One thing however, I will say that since yesterday, access has been delayed and much slower than usual. Rather than near immediate item listing, I have had delays of 10-20 seconds to retrieve the items. Further, this has been tested from multiple locations and connections. Point being, there does seem to be performance issues for the past 24 hours or so (at least here).

    Ben

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  29. I agree.. After reading about your experience with GR, I have now switched. Not only am I going through items much faster, I find I am able to collate them much better for future use (i.e. tagging). I had previously used Newsgator and find GR to be far superior for mass reading. I also have really enjoyed the trends/ stats.

    One thing however, I will say that since yesterday, access has been delayed and much slower than usual. Rather than near immediate item listing, I have had delays of 10-20 seconds to retrieve the items. Further, this has been tested from multiple locations and connections. Point being, there does seem to be performance issues for the past 24 hours or so (at least here).

    Ben

    Like

  30. I have been using the Google Reader for a couple of days and I have found it pretty convenient. Much more useful than built-in Firefox’ RSS.

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  31. I have been using the Google Reader for a couple of days and I have found it pretty convenient. Much more useful than built-in Firefox’ RSS.

    Like

  32. BlogReader: how long does it take for you to look at a tree and decide it’s a tree? It takes me about 1/30th of a second.

    So, why should I spend more than 10 seconds on a post deciding whether it’s interesting or not?

    The ones I find interesting I spend considerably more than 10 seconds on. Those are the ones I share with you.

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  33. BlogReader: how long does it take for you to look at a tree and decide it’s a tree? It takes me about 1/30th of a second.

    So, why should I spend more than 10 seconds on a post deciding whether it’s interesting or not?

    The ones I find interesting I spend considerably more than 10 seconds on. Those are the ones I share with you.

    Like

  38. I can give no complaints about Google Reader’s speed. The only time it ever affects me is when I’m on a bit of a wonky wireless network. Other than that it’s speed is more than adequate.

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  39. I can give no complaints about Google Reader’s speed. The only time it ever affects me is when I’m on a bit of a wonky wireless network. Other than that it’s speed is more than adequate.

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  40. You must be using it on Windows because it gets dog slow and the CPU spikes to 100% when I use it on my G4 PowerBook regardless of Safari, Camino, or Firefox. When I use it with Firefox on Windows is flies and never bogs down.

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  41. You must be using it on Windows because it gets dog slow and the CPU spikes to 100% when I use it on my G4 PowerBook regardless of Safari, Camino, or Firefox. When I use it with Firefox on Windows is flies and never bogs down.

    Like

  44. I used to get frustrated with not being able to sync my RSS readers between home/work/school. I tried Google Reader for a bit then I found Gregarius. Its a nice, extensible, web-based GPL feed reader and it lets me keep everything I ever pull down off a feed in my own database. Always been fairly quick, but that might just have to do with my server.

    I think the best point is has over Google Reader is that you can write in plugins or theme it, or just hack on it in general to make it prefect for you. If you enjoy that kind of thing 🙂

    The only bad thing IMHO is that the keyboard shortcuts are all “Mark This Whole Feed Read”, but there is a nice double click to mark plugin that makes up for it.

    It’s not for everyone, but I really like it and thought I’d share. Check it out at http://www.gregarius.net/ or just look at my install at http://rss.velvetcache.org/

    Like

  45. I used to get frustrated with not being able to sync my RSS readers between home/work/school. I tried Google Reader for a bit then I found Gregarius. Its a nice, extensible, web-based GPL feed reader and it lets me keep everything I ever pull down off a feed in my own database. Always been fairly quick, but that might just have to do with my server.

    I think the best point is has over Google Reader is that you can write in plugins or theme it, or just hack on it in general to make it prefect for you. If you enjoy that kind of thing 🙂

    The only bad thing IMHO is that the keyboard shortcuts are all “Mark This Whole Feed Read”, but there is a nice double click to mark plugin that makes up for it.

    It’s not for everyone, but I really like it and thought I’d share. Check it out at http://www.gregarius.net/ or just look at my install at http://rss.velvetcache.org/

    Like

  48. I find Google Reader slow on a variety of machines but I haven’t used the shortcuts. I wish they would combine Bloglines speed with the sharing features of Reader.

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  49. I find Google Reader slow on a variety of machines but I haven’t used the shortcuts. I wish they would combine Bloglines speed with the sharing features of Reader.

    Like

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  51. I’ve been noticing it getting slower every day. I wonder if it has to do with the number of feeds. I can barely get it to load the index page. (right now getting 502 errors)

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  52. I’ve been noticing it getting slower every day. I wonder if it has to do with the number of feeds. I can barely get it to load the index page. (right now getting 502 errors)

    Like

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