Google Reader’s Next Button – I Don’t Get It

June 22, 2007 by 5 Comments

The folks at Google made a blog post today touting the “Next” bookmarklet that can be used with Google Reader.

I don’t get it.

If I wanted to view information on the actual websites, I wouldn’t be using an RSS reader.  Standard browser bookmarks or an online bookmarking service would suffice.

RSS as a bookmarking service?

[tags]rss, googlereader, bookmarking[/tags]

Filed Under: Feeds, Technology ·
  • William C Bonner

    I like reading my news feeds using the keyboard interface.. If I do what they are talking about, I’ve got to add a button in my web browser, and hen hit the stupid button with a mouse. What part of going through the feeds faster does that improve?

    No, if “J” would take me to the next group when there was no more articles in the current group, that would improve things..

    I thought it funny that the google blog that was touting the next feature doesn’t have any way of leaving comments…

  • http://www.divebardreams.blogspot.com divebarwife

    Actually I kinda like it – I prefer to read on the actual sites – I like to be able to see comments, photos, etc. that don’t always show up in the reader. But since it only “Next”s to the next feed with new content – it’s definitely much more efficient than just standard bookmarks where you still have to go to the page to see if the content is new.

    It’s not perfect – it will stick on a site if it has more than one piece of new content – but I’d image they’ll be tweaking it for a bit here.

  • Ben

    I also rely on keyboard commands, and was dubious about the “next”. But, I noticed if I put the “next” link in my bookmark bar, I can use Firefox or Camino’s keyboard commands (command #) to do my nexting. So now I have to hold down command with my thumb and tap a 4 with my index finger. Still a keyboard command.

    However, the pages still load much slower than the feeds do in GReader….

    -Ben

  • Ben

    My browser bad: Firefox doesn’t support command # -ing to bookmarks. Safari and Camino do.

  • T.

    Point is, the Next bookmarklet slows things waaaaay down. That’s funny in an unfunny way, because I use Google Reader to read my articles faster, not the other way around. Unless you subscribe to 5 feeds or less and check them daily, this just doesn’t make any sense. Unless, of course, you don’t mind waiting a couple of hours for the sites to load. In that case, you’re all very welcome to.