There are thou­sands of ways to har­vest and read the vari­ous syn­dic­ated feeds you get from all your favour­ite web­sites to your screen. Integration of feeds onto web­sites, spe­cial­ist cli­ent soft­ware, Flash applic­a­tions and all man­ner of wid­gets to crowd up your desktop are just some of the ways that people read the content.

But that’s the thing; although I am cer­tain that there are many dif­fer­ent ways that people have been read­ing the feeds, and I’m cer­tain that they’re all very happy with their respect­ive meth­ods, nothing’s seemed to quite fit into my lifestyle.

RSS feeds and their vari­ous cous­ins are all about con­veni­ence and speed. That was their point. If it was dif­fi­cult to gain access, modify and read them, then their raison d’être is neg­ated, and you may as well just remem­ber the huge list of vari­ous sites and blogs you would oth­er­wise read each day.

Not a nice task.

Once again, how­ever, Google stepped into the fray and like some glor­i­ous Internet Angel, and gave me Google Reader. God bless ‘em.

For me, it’s per­fect. I can eas­ily add, delete, man­age and group all my feeds into whatever man­ner I choose. I can mark art­icles of par­tic­u­lar interest, add them to a pub­lic screen that I can share with my friends, and can search all my feeds for par­tic­u­lar keywords (and here’s the kicker) all on my mobile. When I’m stuck on the train into Central London on the com­muter trail, this is a ver­it­able Godsend.

Yes, there are other applic­a­tions, and as a feed reader alone they do the job just as well as Google Reader; Feedlounge and Bloglines are the two that come to mind imme­di­ately, but then comes my next point. Netvibes and it’s won­der­ful desktop inter­face was the most beau­ti­ful thing that I hap­pily used for the longest time. It’s abil­ity to take all feeds, plus all sorts of other wid­gets and put them in one glor­i­ous screen was a fant­astic fea­ture, but slowly it became unman­age­able for me as the num­ber of feeds I read increased (last count I’m read­ing around 90 feeds, and I add more each day…). One slow move across to Google Personalised Home page, and one Google Reader wid­get addi­tion, and all my prob­lems were solved. Two months later my Google page con­tains Calendars, YouTube videos, easy access to a pleth­ora of Wikis and search engines and all the feeds I can pos­sibly con­nect to.
Netvibes, I’m sorry, I’ve left you for another web­site; one that has bet­ter integ­ra­tion with a web-based RSS reader.

You remem­ber all those films set in the dis­tant Future where people would watch, on one screen, around 30 pro­grammes at once? It’s like that, but not so dated. We might not have jet­packs and hov­er­boards yet, but my Lordy, if this isn’t the Future Today, I don’t know what is.

Google, whatever reas­ons you have for provid­ing all these won­der­ful applic­a­tions for free, please don’t sud­denly become an Evil Overlord and enslave all our chil­dren just yet…

By the way, there’s a tiny little logo at the bot­tom of this page with ‘RSS’ next to it. Just thought I’d point it out… :D