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I currently use Google Reader to subscribe to and read RSS and Atom feeds. It has pros and cons.

One of the great things about Google Reader is that its entirely in the cloud. I can access it wherever I am, whichever operating system I'm using. Also as its run on Google's servers, they pay the bandwidth bill not me. I subscribe to lots of feeds (181 as of now) but I don't read them all all the time. If I don't want to read some high volume feeds I don't open them and they don't get downloaded to my machine. This also means that its Google that checks the feed for updates all the time, not my machine. And that's the beauty of using a cloud based feed reader. Google only has to download the feed 1 time for all the subscribers of that feed in Reader, not once for each user.

This is the sole reason I use a cloud based reader, and this pro is too great to get me to switch. Unfortunately there are some things that I don't like about reader and some things I wish I could add. That's the bad thing about using a cloud service like this, I cannot edit the code for my needs. Open source desktop applications can, but with Google's cloud services you cannot.

Its good that in Reader you can download a list of your subscribed feeds, but I wish I could also download the feed items themselves in bulk. There is a copyright issue here that being, from what I've experienced when you subscribe to a new feed in Reader you can view the past postings going back probably to when it was first indexed, despite these items no longer being in the feed. I want to be able to download those too. I guess since you are already downloading them when you view them this is the same, so its not a new issue.

This is turning into a debate about cloud services vs. desktop software, so I'll stop here.

A few weeks ago I noticed one of Google's search experiments, keyboard shortcuts. I really like this feature and hope it graduates from experiment status however one small thing I noticed is that (at least for me) makes me more willing to click on googles ads. When I did a Google search with no keyboard shortcuts I would just skill over the ads and go straight to the results, but now with keyboard shortcuts turned on the default position of the "cursor" (actually and arrow) is at the top pointing to ads (if there are any). This distracts me to look at the ad and more likely to visit it.

Additionally in the case where the first result is the same as the top add, where I would previously just go straigh to the main link, with shortcuts its easier to just press enter with the cursor on the ad. The two diagrams below show this.

[caption id="attachment_126" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Google search with keyboard shortcuts. Notice that the top ad and the 1st result are (almost) the same. But since its easier to press Enter than J then Enter I am more likely to go to the ad...."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_127" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="... however in the classical view I would just click on the 1st regular link with the mouse as its just as easy to click the non-ad vs. the ad."][/caption]