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What Is Google Reader?

By , About.com Guide

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Google ReaderScreen capture by Marziah Karch

Location:

Google Reader is located on the Web at reader.google.com.

What Google Reader Does:

Google Reader is a feed reader. It allows you to subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds. You can manage feeds, label them, and even share your feed collection with others.

Google Reader is located on the Web at reader.google.com.

Mobile Phone Access:

What Feeds Do:

RSS and Atom are types of feeds. Feeds are lists of updated items that are published from many types of Web sites. Blogs, news services, and even photo albums often offer feeds.

A feed can be anything from a simple headline to the entire updated entry, depending on the settings specified at the Web site.

Many Google products offer feeds, including:

Status:

Google Reader is in Google Labs. This means that it is still considered experimental. However, Google Reader seems very well developed at this point.

Competing Products:

Limitations:

Google Reader only reads public feeds. If you subscribe to private or semi protected feeds from services such as LiveJournal, you will only be able to see the public entries.

Notes:

If you read multiple blogs or news feeds, you really need a feed reader.

Google Reader is newer to the scene than Bloglines or Newsgator and not quite as refined, but it is already a worthy competitor. I was a longtime Bloglines user, but I have been very happy with my switch to Google Reader.

Google Reader offers a very clean interface, and it uses the same Google Account login that most other Google products use.

In addition to subscribing to feeds, you can organize feeds into folders, mark favorite items within feeds and publish public feed collections.Google Reader will also generate a cut and paste snippet of JavaScript code that you can add to a Web site or blog.

Google Reader can import your feeds from most popular feed readers.

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