Tyler (Chacha) |

• Blog
• Shares

I, as well as many people, use Google Reader on a daily basis. Right now, it is my main point of access for reading blogs. But I think that many people aren’t able to use Google Reader to its full capacity because of the way social features are poorly implemented.

Google just launched the ability to ‘comment’ on items after you have shared them. Anyone who can see the Shared Item can also see your comment. But collaborating with other people on Google Reader is somewhat difficult. For a long time, you could share items with other people directly. But this ‘friend’ ability required you be friends with them on Google Chat. Setting up the Google Chat friendship is annoying, and you don’t always want your Google Reader friends having instant access to you on IM.

Google Reader could be very large if it built in features that made it easy to connect with other Google Reader users on blog entries. I think that this approach could shut down a lot of services simply because most social networks are fueled by the sharing of, well, blog entries! Why not skip the in-between from the reader to the service? 

What do you think that Google could add to their RSS Reader?

I appreciate blogs that give me a post with a lot of links, because it gives me a lot of content that I can pick and choose. I don’t have to go through all the links, but if I see something I like, I can click on it and read it. So here are some interesting things I found this week.

This week I went through almost everything I could find about Google Reader. I wanted to reform how I use my reader, so here are the articles I went through to get my information.

“Grow Bigger Ears in 10 minutes” - Chris Brogan

“Observations from a Google Reader Spring Clean” – The Inquisitr 

“Find New Feeds You’ll Love With SuggestRSS” - The 2.0 Life

“My Hiatus From RSS – Is RSS Really Necessary?” - Stay N’ Alive

Here are some other things I read this week

The Twitter Followholic: An Epidemic - Mashable

This post concentrates why many people follow a large amount of people on Twitter. It also lists some great programs to use in order to clean up your following list like Twitoria. Twitoria finds out how long since your followers last posted.

Ultimate Round-Up For Version Control with Subversion - Smashing Magazine

If you are into programming or designing, you really want to make sure you have versions of your work so you can go back to old styles or back to a certain point in time. Here, Smashing Magazine sums of everything you need to know about the popular versioning system, Subversion.

How To Strategically Comment On Other Blogs - David Risely 

David Risely is a great source on ways to improve your blog and your habits to increase your blogs audience. I strongly suggest that if you are a blogger, to subscribe to his feed and read his blog. You can get some stuff that can really help. This post is about commenting on other’s blogs, and how you should do it.

If you want to find more of the article I read, check out my Google Reader Shares. If you want me to read your blog, please put it in the comments. I am currently looking for blogs to read and would love to check out yours.

Sorry to disappoint, but I am going to skip posting today so that I can prepare for content tomorrow. If you really wan’t to find my stuff, check out my Twitter account (http://twitter.com/chacha102). I also, constantly post things to my Google Reader Shared items. 

Don’t worry though. Tomorrow I will get you caught up with a great amount of information with a ton of links. I hope to do a giant blog post of links once a week. 

Also, please take this time to check out the aggregation of NextTech’s blogs at thenextintech.com. NextTech is a group of young blogger that collaborate together. They provide hosting for this blog and I couldn’t do what I do without them.

If you would like to guest post on T&M News, email me at chacha@chacha102.com. 

Will see you tomorrow!

  Chrome vs Firefox. This debate has been happening for a long time, and I think there is a clear winner, simply because of the URL bar. Let me explain. Chrome allows me to easily build a URL in a few keystrokes, and autocomplete’s URLs instead of requiring me to click on something to complete it.

1 : Auto Completion

As you begin typing in Chrome, even at the first letter, you will have a website recommendation from your past history. Look at this, after typing ‘a’, it shows me a recommendation.

Now, I can hit enter, or I can keep typing. As I continue typing, the addresses just keep changing. If I see the right one, I can simply press enter, and I go to the website.

Compare this now, to Firefox. Once I type, I must either click or scroll with my mouse buttons in order to pick a URL.

2 : Building a URL

Sometimes, for people who know how websites are structured, you want to build a URL. To build off the fact that Chrome autocomplete’s URL’s for me, if I want to add something to the end, I just simply have to tap the right arrow key, and I will be at the end of the URL, ready to type.

3 : Google Suggest

The last thing that I would like to praise Google Chrome on is that fact that Google Suggestion is built right in, so that as I type, no matter what letter I am on, it will search my history, and relevant Google results, to give me more options. Firefox however simply gives me a search of my history, and often returns irrelevant results. for example, if I type q, Google Mail shows up because the key (The long hash tag of like 25 characters), has a q in it.

While some of this may seem to just be nit picking at Firefox, I think that Google’s ease of use for their address bar makes it more fun to browse the internet on. Anyone care to disagree? Post it in the comments.