Up until now I've been using Thunderbird as my main news reader. It's been convenient to consider "news" and "emails" as similar content and check them both in the same software. However, because my news reading history has only been kept locally, once I get home I can't tell which ones are read.

I thought I'd give Netvibes a shot. It's a cool looking thing, I can add a widget to display my Flickr photos, a calendar and a search box. The only thing is, I wanted it to read my news. If I want Flickr, I'll go to Flickr. If I search, I'll probably use the Firefox search bar. There are a few other issues for me with Netvibes, one is each newsfeed is laid out in a separate panel. And two, the text is small and I only get the headline, no content preview which I was at least getting in Thunderbird.

So I thought I'd get Google Reader a try. First of all it gives me a central place to keep track of what's read; I can read a couple of articles at home, and finish reading the rest at work (in my break, of course). There are other cool features of Google Reader. One I like the most is the instant "mark as read" system which ticks articles off as being read you scroll down your list. The display of articles in the list is also good - you get the full article with images and even video included from within the Reader Page.

Adding new feeds to the Reader is also a breeze (for Firefox at least). Click on an RSS feed link and you'll get an option page to add it to Google Reader. It becomes a little pervasive because you can no longer view the content of the feed in Firefox, only within the Reader. However, it's so quick that you'll very quickly build up your reading list and find it really difficult to squeeze in some work.

For a comparison of Google Reader and Bloglines, check out this Lifehacker article.