Google Reader is definitely part of my daily tasks. It’s a great tool that brings me about 300 items every 24h and I checked it a couple of times per day. Direct consequence is that I spend more time scrolling over items on Google Reader that I’d like to! And when I’m happy with most of its ergonomic there is a few points that in my opinion could be updated in the next release…
My list:
1. Stop loading read items
2. Group items on the same topic
3. Hide / emphasis items based on keyword watch
4. Limit the number of characters displayed by default
5. Color code selected feeds
1. Stop loading read items
Once I have read an item (i.e I scrolled through it) I would like it to stop loading and free my bandwidth (and my screen).
At the moment, even if I reached the next item, those before will keep loading. This is particularly annoying when one of the “read” item contained many pictures. It uses the bandwidth for nothing and makes the screen “jump back” as soon as a new picture is loaded in the post before… It’s starting some kind of race in between the user and Google Reader. The user trying to get rid of the item scrolling down as fast as he can, when Google Reader on its side keeps filling the screen with pictures from an already read item…
2. Group items on the same topic
How annoying it is to go through the same news 20 or 50 times… When Microsoft announced that they wanted to buy Yahoo! I got the news about 50 different times from various blogs that pretty much all copied the very same lines… I guess we could call that “item spamming”…
To avoid that I would like to be able to rate my feeds. For example, in my Web 2.0 folder, Techcrunch will get a high rate and other blogs will be rated below. So I would have only one item (the Techcrunch one) telling me about the Micro-Yahoo! offer and at the bottom of this item I would have a summary of other blogs treating the same news. Google definitely has the technology to analyse the content of my items…
3. Hide / emphasis items based on keyword watch
The idea here is to go as fast as possible through a massive amount of data / information. To achieve that I’d like to be able to set-up watch for keywords like I can already do with Google Alert. Ideally I could watch my feeds for word or sentences such as “photoblogging” or “tangler plugin” and have my items underlined when one of my keywords is detected by Google. Once again I assume they have the technology 
4. Limit the number of caracter displayed by default
I’m tired of scrolling down endless boring topics with tons of screenshots and text. I know I could use the keyboard shortcut (k) to jump to the next item, but most of the time I only use my mouse and not ready to jump on whatever key when finally deciding that the item was definitely too long…
So why not limit the number of characters displayed by default? 300, 500, 1000 characters… Of course it would be possible to change this number in the settings.
5. Colour code selected feeds
This one is more of a light cosmetic fix, but it could potentially improve one more time the efficiency of going through an important amount of items.
To do so the idea would simply be to color code selected feeds… I would for example color cod in red my Mashable feed so every time an item is published from this feed it would appear with a light red background …and becomes easily recognisable among all the other feeds. I told you it was simple
And you? Any idea on how to improve Google Reader? Join the discussion on Tangler:
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