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Google’s desktop-based RSS reader: Thumbs up! Nice and speedy
May 31, 2007 | 4:20 pm
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By David Rothman
Google’s new desktop RSS reader, seamlessly tied in with the online version via IE or Firefox, can store thousands of items for your reading offline, and not just headlines alone. You’ll see the new wrinkle as an option in your existing Google Reader after a short, easy installation process.
The improved reading system comes with a few catches. For example, you can’t read an entire blog post or news story if the whole thing isn’t included in the feed—a sin that too many media sites are eager to commit. Silly. The TeleBlog just may be reaching more people via RSS than the old-fashioned way. Of course, that means that updated, better-proofed versions of posts won’t catch up immediately with people reading the TeleBlog offline—say, while they’re 25,000 feet above the Atlantic in a jet without WiFi. So be it. Practicality ahead of vanity!
Part of Google Gears tech to bridge online and offline
The caching is part of Google Gears technology, and I like it. Google’s Reader, running from my desktop, is a zillion times faster than the online version alone. One reason could be that the Reader leaves out images; I myself would rather that Google gave people a choice of whether to include them, and under what conditions. At any rate, I’m looking forward to Geared-up word-processing, Gmailing and the rest, now that I’ve gotten a quick sample of the technology.
The e-book angle
Gven the hefty caching capacity, this baby just might a way to make heavily networked books usable offline. Nice going, Google! Hey, this is one way to help reconcile the e-book visions of Bill J (deeply into online networked books) and me (online’s fine but I’d prefer to own books for real—to store them locally).
For more: See Google News roundup. Now, suppose that instead of fighting Google, newspapers worked with Google on customized RSS apps with advertising embedded. Heck. Maybe that’s happening already. If not, it needs to.
Reminder: I’ve invested in Google over the long run for retirement purposes, though you’d never know it from my past rants against the company’s presentation of e-books.
Note: It’s now 10 p.m. This post has been updated several times.
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Comments:
Actually, I think I take it all back.
I’ve just got reader working on my laptop (with Gears for offline), and it only caches the RSS tidbit (the title and date and description and URL part). If you want to read the whole story, it still goes out to the external Web site to pull it in.
They need to add that second-level caching…
Totally agree! Thanks for the update, Bill, and I’ll welcome further details as you learn more. David
Gears basically adds three things to the Web browser (via a plug-in, for you geeks out there, and which currently is available for IE and Firefox — they have a Safari port running and you can build it from source with Gears in it, if you can build Safari from source), and provides Javascript APIs for all three: threading, an SQL-interfaced local (client-side) data store, and a system for defining a manifest which describes all the pieces of a Web application (and a way of automatically keeping those pieces up-to-date in your browser cache). There’s actually a fourth piece, because the SQL storage piece is based on SQLite, and Google and the SQLite crowd are developing an extension to SQLite which gives you fast full-text search (again, this would be in the Web browser) to use to find things in pages you’ve looked at, or Gmail messages, or (I suppose eventually) WAR AND PEACE.
There was a talk about Dojo Offline, which is being re-built to use Gears, and provides a higher-level API to all the Gears functionality which also defines things like automatic application data synchronization.