Search king Google has unveiled Google Reader, its entrance into the news feed reading business.
The program, called Google Reader, aggregates news and updates from selected sites. It lets users subscribe to material from the sites and create a reading list that they can sort and organize. Users can post news items to their blogs or send them to friends via e-mail directly through the Reader site, Google said.
The amount of information on the Web is rapidly increasing, Google said on a frequently asked questions page about the product. Google Reader helps you keep up with it all by organizing and managing all the content you’re interested in. Instead of continuously checking your favorite sites for updates, you can let Google Reader do it for you.
It eliminates the need to continually visit each individual Web site for updates. Other news feeds make use of e-mail. It remains to be seen whether the cache associated with Google’s brand will help Google Reader find an audience.
More broadly, news feeds highlight the changing way people are getting information from the Internet. Google Reader supports RSS “Really Simple Syndication,” which Google initially snubbed, and a lesser known news feed format known as Atom.
It will face competition from a bevy of other, more established and mature readers, including SharpReader and NewsGator, which turns Microsoft Outlook, the e-mail feature, into an RSS reader.
Several major Internet browsers, including Firefox and Opera, have RSS features built in.
The move is Google’s latest effort around the trend of distributing news and updates via RSS and Atom technology. In August, the company incorporated news feeds into its popular Google News aggregation service but limited it to seven key subject areas designated by Google.
Several Google services, including Sidebar desktop search tool, contain features common to a news feed. But Google Reader is the company’s first actual news feed reader.
Using the reader service requires registering for a Gmail account, Google’s free online e-mail service.
Google took the wraps off the new reader service at the Web. 2.0 conference held in San Francisco.