I've been a Google fan as long as I can remember and have been using most of their services (iGoogle, Gmail, Greader, search engine, etc.) except for Blogger which I carefully dismissed a year ago. As far as Blogger goes, to make it a long story short, I preferred Wordpress for its extensibility among other things. Obviously, I'm using neither services but suffice to say, Blogger is the only Google service that I actually disliked.
Going back to my main post's agenda, tonight I realized that I have been consistent with my web application preferences except for my RSS feed reading. I have tried most web/desktop readers available out there for PC and for the most part stuck with/between Newsgator's FeedDemon and Google Reader. Both are solid applications and have their own pros and cons but I'm not going to go through them here. Tonight, I have decided to make all my reading in just a single application. No more switching back and forth between applications since this can be a painful experience, more so because of the the fact that I have to update my subscription from one application to the next. In a simple technical term, I hate having to import/export my subscriptions from one to the next.
Between
NewsGator's FeedDemon (desktop) and
Google Reader (web-based), I decided to opt for Google Reader for a few solid reasons. First, it is web-based therefore there's no need to save posts in the local drive and everything can be viewed within the browser. This can be a serious disadvantage for offline reading but can be fixed by installing
Google Gears which provides offline access and downloads posts. In most cases, the only time that I go through my subscriptions is whenever I'm online anyways, so it being a web-based is not an issue at all. When I'm offline, I prefer reading an actual book rather than reading through the article and blog posts...so downloading each posts for offline viewing is only going to be a waste.
At first, the Google Reader interface may look a little bit unfriendly but with a little help from
GreaseMonkey and a
Google Reader "script", the interface suddenly becomes unobtrusive. Unfortunately, this is only available in Firefox since GreaseMonkey is an add-on to the browser. In a nutshell, GreaseMonkey allows Javascripts to be embedded to the browser in order to enhance the user's interaction within a specific website. In this case, the "script" somehow re-arranges and renders the Google Reader's interface in a much simpler, de-cluttered format that's more appealing to the eyes. Since I made the switch from a desktop application to web-based, I can finally uninstall FeedDemon and stick with Google Reader.