Smackdown: Google Reader vs. Pageflakes

I’ve mentioned here a number of times the benefits of Pageflakes. I heard of Google Reader long before Pageflakes and fiddled with it for a little while, but was quickly drawn to the allure that Pageflakes offered me. You could easily add “pageflakes” to be part of a much larger collection of yours enabling you to view at a glance what’s going on with your favorite online destinations. News related flakes go here, friends go here, and the other stuff goes there. Easy.

Now, I’m having second thoughts. Here’s why.

Google Reader
It’s layout is simple like it should be because potentially you could have a lot that you’ve subscribed to and just don’t need things getting in your way. And because of its simplicity, it loads fast.

You still can view images or videos from Google Reader and easily click to the actual source. Moving about your subscriptions for better organization is easy, too. The one drawback I could find is that once you create a folder, there doesn’t seem to be a way to delete it. (If you know, then let me know. ) Had it not been for that, I would have given it a perfect score.

An additional feature I like is the bookmarklet you can add to your browser. When you see a site you like and want to subscribe to it, just click the link in your browser and it will take you to the GR interface for a preview. Then you can confirm your subscription.

In contrast, with Pageflakes, you have to click on the site’s feed and, if the blog owner has something like Feedburner’s setup, then you click on Pageflakes as your choice. Google Reader’s a choice, too, but this bookmarklet just makes it a little easier for me to subscribe wherever I am an in case the blog owner hasn’t provided an easy way to subscribe.

Also unique to this reader is its ability to show stats for your feeds or “trends” as it calls them. In other words, it can show you the frequency of delivery for each source you’ve subscribed to.

So if you find that a source isn’t producing as much as you would like or had hoped for, you have the numbers to help you decide if you should stay on with them or not.

Pageflakes
I had been using this one for months. I loved the way you could easily drag-and-drop things around and select from the numerous other community-generated “flakes” that can be added to your collection. If a page got to full, it was a simple matter of just creating a new page and starting over with the content you subscribed to.

But then I started noticing the length of time it took to download a page (I made several to categorize my feeds). Sometimes it took longer than I felt necessary to complete a full page worth of information. Completely unscientific, of course, but went with my gut and it was telling me there had to be a better way.

One option to circumvent (cover up?) this lag would be to create more pages with not as much content in them. Or perhaps it wasn’t Pageflakes’ fault at all, just the sources sending their info to me. Either way, it was noticeable.

However, one strength I found that’s similar to Google Reader is that you don’t necessarily have to give it the URL to a feed. As mentioned earlier, if the site you’re wanting to subscribe to has Feedburner’s list of choices, chances are Pageflakes is one of them making it easy to subscribe. But if you wanted to, you could enter a site’s URL (non-feed, that is) and have it search for the feed via the interface.

And another thing it has that Google Reader doesn’t is the community that can develop pageflakes on its own for public use. These include note taking, games, login to various email services, and lots more (think widgets). It could be argued that that is too much and that it should leave those specialities to other sites and services. But that’s why it places that decision in the user’s hands.

One things they both share is that users can share their collections with others.

Going by the numbers (stars), Google Reader comes out ahead, but it’s such a close call, really. Close enough to have me suggest that you try each one to see how they feel to you and how compatible they are to the way you work.

[tags]google reader,pageflakes,reader,feeds,subscriptions,rss[/tags]

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