o(ther)l/log

I'm not convinced by the new Google Reader. The interface looks bulky and inefficient. The 'lens' trick is a good idea when you're quickly browsing the latest posts in your feedroll, but it's really missing context. You don't really have an idea of which feeds have been active, no overview of what's the current state of your subscriptions. With just a few feeds this is workable, but for a medium/large subscription list, it's problematic.

When you bring the 'your subscription pane', you do get information about your feeds, but the UI makes it quite disconnected from the reading part. A lot of screen real estate is competely lost just by displaying the feed URLs - which are almost totally useless in this context. The import and search process is unreliable, even for OPML files.

I was really impressed by the gmail interface, so much better than others webmail solutions. The most interesting feature of gmail was the 'archiving' part, which is the soft underbelly of other webmails - which are basically inbox-readers. And the rest of the UI brings a very fluid and lean experienceI. have the exact opposite feeling with the Reader: it's ok for browsing the last 20 posts, but the rest of the UI looks like a screaming 'hey, I'm a web 2.0 app' sign, sacrifying a lot to usability. When I observe gmail or gmap GUI, I see very few 'moving parts': it's a traditional web experience - on steroids. Google Reader is more a strange hybrid between a web app and a client-app-in-browser.

Or maybe I'm already blasé of ajax UIs ? I smell some overengineering here. Update: ok, I've been unfair. Using Google Reader with your common use case to be mostly aggregated feeds is quite nice. My usual pattern is more feeds/group of feeds focused, which is not the sweet spot for Reader, so I was a bit biased by the use of my desktop app.