I switched to Google Reader after using various other online RSS News Feed Readers like Netvibes, desktop applications and Firefox extensions. I would say it is the best overall news reader that I tried so far but it is having a few quirks that annoy the hell out of me.
The first thing that I was frantically searching for was a way to sort the subscriptions alphabetically in Google Reader. After searching through all settings and various Internet search engines I came up with nothing. Yes, that’s right. There is no way to sort the subscriptions automatically in Google Reader.
The only thing that you can do is drag and drop them around so that they are listed in alphabetical order. Imagine doing that with 200+ RSS News Feeds. That would take a while. Most users probably import their first batch of RSS News Feeds using an OPML file which could be sorted alphabetically.
Every new entry to Google Reader on the other hand is added at the bottom after each folder and existing subscription which means it has to be manually dragged and dropped into the right location.
I was recently looking for one specific feed that I subscribed to and it took me almost a minute to locate it because the subscribed feeds could not be sorted properly.
Exporting and importing the RSS News Feeds does not help either unless they would be imported into an application that provides access to a “sort” function that can sort the feeds alphabetically. That would on the other hand be much work and something that had to be done regularly.
Tags: google reader, netvibes, news feeds, rss, rss news feeds, subscriptions
