--- title: "Too hard on Google Reader?" date: 2005-10-07T23:36:12-04:00 url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2005/10/07/too-hard-on-google-reader/ author: Les Orchard tags: [asides, rss, syndication, google, googlemaps, rants] --- # Too hard on Google Reader? You know after I posted that [semi-rant on Google Reader][gr], it occurred to me that I was maybe being a bit too hard on it. I mean, obviously, there's evidence of hard work put into this thing. And although I haven't bothered to view source yet, I imagine there's some cool AJAX-style magic going on under there. And, for some (most?) users, this way of viewing feeds is nice and pleasant to use. But, man... all that hard work, and I just can't shake my impression of how *slow* this thing is. And I don't mean how slow it is to load from the server, but the whole UI experience once it's loaded: That is, how slow all the scrolling and the clicking and the navigating is. Wasn't this AJAX thing supposed to be all about quick, slick, and snappy web apps? I guess I feel a bit let down—with all the time it took Google to make a move in the feed aggregator space, and with those PhD's they have laying around, I expected they'd finally have something revolutionary. Not this, not a cute toy *I* could've cobbled together *myself* in short order with Flash or AJAX. (But I haven't, because it'd be useless to me.) For example, take the [Google Maps API][gma]. I just happened to be working with it for a project this week, and I have to say that that's some nice stuff there. That's a platform that feels like some magic. I don't think I could've built *that* from scratch, though it sure is fun building things atop it. [gr]: http://decafbad.com/blog/2005/10/07/google-reader-big-blue-chunky-water-wings [gma]: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/