Google Introduces Feed ReaderGoogle Introduces Feed Reader

Refusing to let a day go by without making a play for headlines, Google today began offering Google Reader, an online RSS feed reader.Chris Wetherell, a software engineer at Google, writes, "We often get asked how anyone's supposed to keep up with the firehose of stuff launched from the web's spigot, so we're offering Reader as a way to help. Like the Personalized Homepage, it's a part of Google's ongoing effort to bring together personalized web content to make information more relevant to users."

It's surprisingly fast (that is, after the intial page cache). Those Google engineers know their AJAX. I really like the keyboard shortcuts -- a lot of Web apps neglect such niceties.

The current version doesn't have any ads, other than those inserted into the RSS stream by the originating Web site.

So far, I prefer Google Reader to Bloglines.