Vargas Software Development

Feeds are the basic foundations for Web 2.0. However, I am very conservative about adopting new extremely popular things people like. Nor I like fashion, nor being in. That is the reason why I never used a feed reader until last week.

Actually, there is nothing new to be said about feeds. Four years ago, there was not a de facto standard. Every blog had a different way to feed you: Atom, some malformed RSS 2.0 feed, or you could subscribe to their mail list to receive an announcement each time there was a new blog post and some advertising emails.

So how could you manage all those information you would like to read about?
A new niche market was opened. Feed readers!!! People wanted to read all blogs they like and wanted to spend their time commenting posts, not writing URLs in their browsers. This early feed readers were done poorly and they didn’t support all standards at all.

And there is even some concerns about security. Some online feed readers didn’t handle contents properly and this was used to design some kind of web attacks (Feed Injection in Web 2.0)

I mean there was not so much maturity in feed generators and feed readers and that was my reason not to use them before. But now, some years had passed by and poor feed readers are almost gone. So I can choose one that fits my needs, this is Google Reader.

Google Reader handles feeds as mails in Gmail. You can star a post you’ve seen for further review or for keeping track about its comments or whatever you do with starring. It is very pleasing to reuse my knowledge as a four-years-older Gmail user with this neat Google service.

But there is more features (I didn’t need them, but I started using them and they rocks!) such as Trends. Trends is very useful to analyze yourself: how much time do you spent reading blogs, what are you favorite (most read) blogs and at what times do you read blogs. I know some people might argue that Google could know even a little more about you that it did, but… who cares?

Yes! I read blogs at any time of the day. I don’t watch TV :P

There is also a Sharing feature that lets me make a collection of good posts and let my friends see all of them (I plan to publish my sharing feed here, if feasible). I’ve sometimes find this very useful (have you ever read a nice article/post and wanted all your contacts to read it? Stop using your IM nick to publish this great posts and use this great feature).

I also find some nice details like exporting your feed list to an OPML file. We use to see that almost any feed reader has a import feature, but what about export? Some people think they will have more customers if they use a strong lock-in scheme. They are all wrong! Users like to feel in owning of their data. What would happen if I find something better than Google Reader? I would like to do a painless migration.

Finally, there is one more important feature I like: details about how much people is subscribed to a blog. This along with sharing makes Google Reader a social Web 2.0 service.

Hey, I only have 26 (me is number 27) subscribers after two years of blogging. Uhm… I need some promoting campaign, what do you think?