Alpesh Nakar's Blog

We found Microsoft accounts on Twitter yesterday and now here is a handful of Google accounts on twitter.

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Continuing from my earlier post on Google services, I look at how another Google Labs product has helped me in my ITsphere.

Before I got hooked on to Google Reader, I had tried many rss feed readers / aggregators. This post tracks my path to the final destination.

I would like to highlight the fact that I have not been into blogosphere for long. It’s less then a year *grins*

I started off with FireFox ‘bookmarking’ some feeds. And then IE7 beta got released and since I wasn’t really into rss feeds, I ported across to IE7 beta. Then the unstoppable happened!!! I was adding feeds by the dozens and since IE7 was in beta, I had to find a better alternative.  My quest to find an alternative, that I could use anywhere, anytime Not limited to one workstation. Honestly, I did not once think that Google Services would cater to my RSS Feed need. It just did not happen.

Well, so what was the alternative? It was Squeet! Yeah – the best solution I found then. Its your feeds in email, so nothing like it. Subscribed, received in Outlook, rules took care of everything else! They also had nice add-ons for IE7 & Firefox. It is rather unfortunate, that I had to move away from Squeet – in a way that is how I found Google Reader!!! Hooray! I was receiving rss feeds-Squeet-emails regularly and as I kept adding the feeds, Squeet matched it with performance. As a backup, I had some sites in IE 7 beta. After couple of months, I noticed IE 7 show new feed items. At that time, I was too busy with our Microsoft Operations Manager rollout, so had not noticed that emails from Squeet had been heading south! Hmm, I tried to login into my account and it was locked out – at Squeet. Well, the reason was that a lot of emails had been bouncing off. There was no reason, since I got all my emails. This was my work email. Also I have subscribed to a couple of SharePoint discussion groups and had been regularly receiving emails on them.

So absolutely no reason for rss feeds-Squeet-emails to fail. Well, I got the account unlocked couple of times. In the meantime I had started exploring live.com. Great clean concept, used only for rss feeds. I was able to import my opml, easily and without any dramas. Basically it had this Share Point look and web part concept ( the concept that I love). BUT! There is always a but! I found organizing my feeds bit too horrible!

So I moved on to Great News! Fantastic. I just loved it! However, this was workstation bound. And then… I came across Google Reader! Literally came across. Seriously, I have not considered any other RSS Feed readers out there. I love Gmail and I just got into Google Reader. I know, this post is supposed to by about Google Services, but bear in mind, there is always a reason, why you end with Google Services and this is what I am highlighting. Other products and services fail to deliver, their marketing and promises baseless, and Google Services don’t rave and rant, but deliver! Trust me, did you ever know or for now know, when will Google Reader come out of Google Labs, to be a fully functional Google Service like Google Search or Google Product like Writely? They will deliver and let you scramble for it aka gmail!

I have been hooked to Google Reader ever since and more so now, primarily because of the following reasons:

1. Web-Based: This eliminates my biggest hurdle of 24x7x365 access.
2. OPML: Import/Export was painless.
3. Manage Subscriptions: Bewdy! I was able to tag, manage my subscriptions as easily as you apply labels in Gmail.
4. Read View: Plain and simple, with a choice of expanded and list view. Automagically mark a feed read as soon as you move to the next feed.
5. Add Subscription: Never been so easy! Type in the Website address and voila!! – choose the tag or ‘folder’
6. List View: You can see updated subscriptions or all. Your subscriptions within the folders can be seen as a group or individual within the folder.
7. Marking – You can star (favorite) your feeds like Gmail.
8. Sharing – Does any other reader do this? For an example hit on My SharePoint Blog and check out what I mean by Sharing. This is awesome! You can even subscribe to my ‘shared feeds’ Basically, I share the feed and then if you have subscribed to the feeds, you will be notified. Another option for me to share – grab a code and put it on my blog/site and people can see what I have been upto
9. ITs my news reader Back when I was in India, I did not open any Website, any newspaper but my Google Reader, because it works and displays like a charm on my iPaq!!!! I was on top of all my feeds

Need I say more? What news reader rss feed aggregator you use?

Next in series – the mother of all Google Services, gMail!

My SharePointBlog

Writing content and leaving indexing to search engines? Well, push for your site content to be indexed as soon as you have published content. Ping them!

Top on list is Google with their  Google Blog Search Pinging Service.

If you are using Windows Live Writer (who isn’t?), then you can add http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 and few other ping servers as seen below.