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A co-worker asked me about feeds, it felt like Christmas in August. I love to share information with people, which is the main reason why I have my own blog. As I was explaining what a feed could do for you, I started talking about Google reader because that’s the one I use. I sat back and thought about it and this is why Google reader makes sense to me.

For those of you who don’t know, a reader can be a web application that gives you whatever new content is available from those sites you follow. I specifically say, “can be” because there are software and web browser plugins that can do the same thing only that it will be managed on your computer rather than on the web. All these provided that you subscribe to your favorites website feeds, you can get the latest and greatest as it becomes available.

My first reason for using Google reader is that I’m “Googlelized,” I use many Google web applications. Here is the list, Gmail, Analytics, Adsense, Reader, Calendar, Talk, Docs and Spreadsheets, and Video. If you use Google services already then you end up on their website most of the time anyway, why not having your reader right in there too. With Google’s latest implementation of iGoogle, I have everything that I need for communicating with others on the web, wherever I go.

Google reader is a simple web application that does what it do in a great way, the many options you have to customize, add feeds, remove feeds, share them, and organize them into folders makes this application a must have. When you sign up for it, it gets tied up to your Gmail address. That’s all you need to start adding favorite feeds, let talk a little about all the options available with Google reader.

Whenever you go into the Google reader, the first page you see is the one with your feeds, which what is all about, right. There is a homepage for the reader that includes a couple of your unread feeds, a recently shared feed, and a recently starred feed. It also has a tip and tricks segment and a shortcut to the Google reader’s blog at Blogspot.

Right under the home tab you have all items, that where you sell all your news that got aggregated on the feed. Under each square of information you have options to control certain features available in the reader. The first one is Add star, which identifies your favorites news that you can later access on the Starred items tab. Then you have Share button where you can mark your news item to be shared over a feed or a widget that you can create on the Shared items tab.

You can even mail your news items to anyone you want, the next options is to mark items as read but note that this button gets marked automatically after you scroll over a news item. Finally, you can add tags to your fees to categorize them on any type of order that makes sense to you. At the top of this window you have some options that allows you to see all your feed items or just the new ones. As well as marking them all as read, this become handy when you come back from vacation. Lastly, you have the option to refresh the page, this is something that I use a lot since new items may arrive as you read old ones.

The Starred items option is self explanatory, this is where you can find all the news items you marked with a Star. The you have the Shared items which holds the items you marked as shared, at the beginning of this page you have some options to share your feed, email those shared items, or put a clip of those shared items on your website or blog. Personally, I use this feature to share links and technology related new on this website.

After all these you have the Trends icon that holds statistics about your feed catcher behavior, you can see the last 30 days of traffic, any particular time of the day, any particular day of the week. Below that you have the reading trends, which gives you information about read items, starred items, and shared items. Subscription trends are another feature that I like, I monitor if a particular feed has not been updated in a while and I immediately unsubscribe from it.

Other options allow you to search for blogs in the Browse section right by the feed addition icon, you can import your feeds from other readers that comes in OPML format. You can manage your subscriptions, unsubscribe, and add an icon on your shortcut bar to add feeds to Google reader automatically. One of the latest options is to be able to read your feeds while offline, the way this works is that once you find a hot spot you download your feeds and store them locally to read them on the go, later syncing with you online feed and marking off all that you read already.

If you are not using a feed catcher or reader I encourage you to try Google reader, is fun, fast, accurate, and is almost 99.9% up and working. If you think that I missed any details, let me know, also leave a comment if you think any particular feature was left behind. I hope that you have enjoyed this article, thanks for reading.