As much as I love Safari as an RSS reader, my loyalties have shifted to Google Reader. Here’s why:
Read Anywhere — Google Reader works on any of my desktops and laptops. It works on my Blackberry Pearl. It not only works on my iPod Touch, it looks fabulous and is fun to flick. It works at an internet kiosk. Now I can tame the feeds any place/time I like. Hopefully that’ll mean fewer marathon catch-up sessions.
Flagging — With Safari, my bookmarks bar is overflowing with articles that either required more time to finish or needed some kind of follow-up. Now I can flag them just like I would an email message. This is a feature I didn’t know I couldn’t live without.
Sharing — I can mark articles and share them through a web page/RSS feed. This is so much easier than blogging about each item, especially things I just want to share without additional comments. [My Shared Google Reader, also available in the nav bar under About Me]
There are still some web comic feeds I’ll leave in Safari since they’ll be difficult to manage on mobile devices. My first glance at Mail.app’s new RSS capabilities didn’t impress, but it’s worth a second look now that Google Reader’s exposed the utility of mail-like features with feeds.
It’s got me thinking about pointing my acm.org email address back to GMail to explore for synergies between various Google apps. It’s getting harder to resist the siren call of a company that does smart things like this–but even if they make their money from ads? Hmmmm.