I feel the need, the need for speed

I've read some of the commentary about Marissa Meyer's speech at the Web 2.0 Conference in which she offered some insight into what Google have learned about speed, the user experience, and user satisfaction.

The lesson, Marissa said, is that speed matters. People do not like to wait. Do not make them.

I hope the Google Reader team were listening. For various reasons I've recently moved from Newsgator to Google Reader as my aggregator and I have to say that for the most part the experience has been excellent.

Things I like:

(1) Starred Items - I can mark an item as starred to come back later and blog about it. This means I can keep the reading process and writing process separate when I want to.

(2) Shared Items - makes it easy to share blog posts with my wife, so I don't have to keep emailing her either the post or a link to the post. She can subscribe to my shared item feed so I don't have to say "Honey, did you see that post about...." anymore. Robert Scoble took this feature one step further and turned this functionality into his link blog, simply by advertising the page / feed details. There are some problems with layout on the page view, but the feed works perfectly well.

(3) River of News - I never really got the argument about a "river of news" until I started to use the "All items" view in Reader. I show only the new items in the expanded view and use the Next / Previous buttons to advance through my unread posts as a river of news. I don't usually use keyboard shortcuts as a rule and I know that I could use the j / k keys for Next / Previous movement, for some reason I personally prefer the Next / Previous buttons. Each item I land on is automatically marked as read. I can "star" or "share" as I go. I can also email or tag items but I don't use the email feature often and haven't used the tagging feature at all. I don't have to use the river of news view and when I want to, I can zero in on feeds that I'm interested in at a particular point in time. What I have noticed though is that I do get through the reading process faster than I did using folders in Outlook. I haven't changed the number of feeds I'm reading so unless everyone is suddenly writing a whole lot less than before the river of news approach is definitely speeding up how fast I can get through my reading.

What is less good is the time it takes to load items into the view. As I move through my river of news it appears that the reader loads twenty items at a time but it seems not to load the next 20 until you get to the bottom of the current twenty, so I'm continually waiting while the reader is "loading next 20 items".

To be fair Google Reader is still a beta product and they're probably still working on improvements. As Marissa has pointed out though, speed matters.

Tags: Google Reader, Newsgator, Robert Scoble