Gather ’round, kids. Gather ’round. I’ll tell you a story about the early days of the internet: pre-2006. Facebook was a relative unknown and Twitter was the sound a bird made right outside your open window while you tried to sleep off a long night of outdoor merriment on an Applebee’s patio.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was all the rage. That’s how people got their news online! You’d “subscribe” to the “feed” of a site you liked and you’d use an RSS reader to organize all of those subscriptions in one place. (More on Techland: 18 Android Apps To Get You Started)
It was like Twitter but everything had links to articles and nobody had an inflated sense of self-importance. A link to a post about where somebody had just “checked in” or how a certain barista at a coffeehouse had been underperforming vis-a-vis his or her job duties would have seemed downright silly. Thank goodness Twitter and Facebook have changed all that!
So old codgers like yours truly and other web users who aren’t “with it” any more still tend to rely on RSS for certain news finding missions. And one of the more ubiquitous RSS readers is Google’s web-based service, simply called “Google Reader.”
While Google Reader is available in a web-based format for iPhones and Android phones, the company recently released a free, dedicated Google Reader app for Android. You can use it to read your subscriptions, star articles you’d like to read later, and send articles to others via Bluetooth, Facebook, e-mail or Twitter.
There’s even a setting that allows you to use the up and down volume keys on your phone to navigate back and forth between articles. (More on Techland: 18 iPhone Games To Keep You Occupied)
While there are several freely-available RSS reader apps on multiple platforms, Google Reader presents a simple layout and keeps everything in sync between your phone and any other device you use to access the site.
It’s available for free in the Android Market. Simply search for “Google Reader” from your Android handset to find it.
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