A month or so ago I checked out Google Reader and I wasn’t impressed. They recently released an update, so I decided to check it out.

They’ve introduced an expanded River of News style view which shows the full text of each item, which addresses my main objection about not being able to quickly scan new feed items by scrolling through the list. This is a big improvement, but it would be nice if it would show more than 20 items at a time, especially since, in my experience, it takes a noticable amount of time to load the next 20. It does autoload the next 20 as you scroll to the bottom of the page, but it still introduces an irritating little pause in my skimming experience.

The expanded view makes it worth considering, so I’m going to load the OPML reading list from my desktop reader and see how it works for me. I’ll share my impressions here.