Google Reader: Maybe for some, but not for me.

This week has been really busy; my team from our CMA e-marketing course and I have been busy working on our first assignment. We’re preparing a case study comparing two online travel agencies, Expedia and Travelocity. I was up until 3 am last night editing and my eyes are so puffy I can barely see. Another item to put on the shopping list (ahead of my beloved iPhone) will have to be new reading glasses. I’m sick of blowing up text on every website I visit to 150%.

One of the things on my to-do list this week was to investigate Google Reader. Our CMA instructor, Michael Seaton, has been extolling its virtues (along with sites like Delicious and Technorati) so I finally took this week to poke around to see what the fuss was about. I’d heard about this type of application before, but my general view went along the lines of, great – another thing I have to immerse myself in or I’ll look like an idiot at dinner parties. Not that I go to a lot of dinner parties, but one likes to be prepared for even theoretical dinner parties. So I created an account on Google, as virtually everything else I have is already on Google.

So what do I think about my brand-spanking new reader account? Eh, not so much. On the one hand, I get what Michael is talking about; he never steers us wrong on these things. It’s very handy to have everything in one place. One of the disadvantages of working freelance all the time is that when I move from company to company, sometimes I forget to forward all my new links to myself on my last day and so I get home and think, what was the url for that cool site I’ve been visiting every day for the past two weeks? Then: total mental block and I have to spend an afternoon searching for them. Apparently my tastes are so exotic, this is not always an easy job. I am so mysterious! Go me!

Back to the subject, Google Reader is a great help in keeping all my links, blogs and random sites of interest organized – and there’s nothing I like more than being organized. So why did the whole experience leave me feeling somewhat meh?

Maybe it’s a chick thing. It’s like the ongoing argument I keep having with Doug. If it were up to him, we’d buy everything online: clothes, housewares, electronics, food... With him, there’s really no reason to leave the house, ever. Even to go to dinner parties. Especially to go to dinner parties.

But not me! I like the shopping experience. I want to go in the stores, see what they have, touch and feel the goods, check out the sales, immerse myself in the brands… I want to BROWSE, damn it! Shoe shopping online? Sacrilege!

The reader was kind of the same thing – once it’s in that format, I lose a lot of the context. Where are my pretty pictures, fonts, bars and banners? I even kind of miss the ads. I guess some (cough-men-cough) find all that stuff extraneous and distracting. I don’t – I feel it adds an extra dimension, an essential dimension really, to the overall experience.

So ask yourself: if someone offered me one big, efficient store to shop for all your needs versus a whole mall of little stores where you could poke around and glean different experiences from each, which would you choose?

Your answer to this question will likely tell you if you’re a potential Google Reader user or not.