Google Reader - the online/offline Feed Reader

I like Google Reader because it's web based & it's nice to take your feeds wherever you go. You can also choose to download & view feeds offline. Since the last year the interface has improved drastically. It has many of the nice GMail features like being able to 'star' your favorite posts, keyboard shortcuts & a thoughtful Feed Search option. If you check your feeds at work, your supervisor better not see the Trends option as it contains exhaustive details of your reading pattern.

The feature I really love is the 'Share' option that let's you tell the world what you've been reading & want others with similar interests to read. You can have Google Reader generate a feed of this shared list & put it as a 'widget' on any web page by embedding a piece of code they provide. You can see how I have utilized it on my code gallery.

Another clever UI feature is the way older posts are fetched asynchronously as you scroll down the feed list frame without having to click on any page numbers when the list goes long.

You need a Google Account to get started with Google Reader. I ran into a weird scenario when I was using 2 different Google accounts for 2 separate websites (GMail & Google Reader) of the Google family in different tabs of Firefox. The header of Google Reader showed the account id I was logged in with and the body showed Feeds linked to my second Google account. Never mind if this sounds complex, the bottomline is, you may find weird behavior if you log into 2 Google family websites with 2 different Google accounts in a tabbed browser.