Google already has an automated news-compiler, Google News, which can be customised to deliver the news you want. But it wants to be a typical news aggregator for personal use as well like Bloglines and My Yahoo. It has just launched Google Reader. It seemed somewhat klunky to me, maybe because it’s only a beta version. No doubt it will improve like all things Google. Red Herring has an article pointing out some of its features. According to the article, it includes a built-in player for downloading podcasts.
But personally I will stick to Bloglines and My Yahoo. A news reader or aggregator is only as good as the content it provides. And currently it’s much easier to add content to Bloglines and My Yahoo than to Google Reader. The latter is said to be more selective, sorting content by relevance etc. But I can do that myself. The first thing I want is ease of use.
The one new Google product which I really like is Google Blogsearch, a search engine developed to hunt through blogs. But Technorati also scours the blogs. It looks like Google is getting more and more like Microsoft, doing what others do. Google-lovers will say it does them better. Sometimes, yes, it does.
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