Google Reader is one of those Google apps that most people asked why they bothered. Lets all be honest, really, the first version of Google Reader sucked hardcore. Sure, it was a concept web application that organized your feeds using a "river" paradigm but was that really very useful? In my mind Google Reader wasn't all that great but it was the best that I had. On occasion I would go and look at what some of the other cool kids were using but those other apps seemed even clunkier than Reader and I always ended up back at Google suffering along. After a while I just gave up on my feeds and went about my way blissfully unaware of what was going on in the tech world. Until today...

I just finished upgrading to Firefox 2.0rc1 (which kicks butt) and had reinstalled all of my extensions. I just happened to remember that I needed to grab the Greasemonkey extension for Reader that let me mark all as read. I clicked over to Reader on the off-chance that they had added that feature only to find a radically different interface.

The new Reader interface is a lot more like a traditional mail client in its organization which is awesome. You can still read your feeds in a throw-em-all-at-me fashion if you want, but why would you?

While Reader has made a monumental step in the road to being useful it is still not quite feature-complete. Things that I would like to see are:

• The ability to search your feeds
• Drag and drop between labels
• Hiding of labels
• Integration with Gmail webclips (which is possible in a hackish way)

Given those things I would say that Google Reader is the hands-down best feed reader.