A couple of days ago, Google released a revamped version of its Google Reader service. This version is a huge improvement compared to the previous one and start felling like a desktop application. But actually, I don’t think RSS feed readers — online or desktop — are a good way to read online material.

The problem with readers is they let you reading articles “outside” the context of the author web site, so you’ll miss the typo, color, layout and any related information given by the author; it’s like rewriting an article you’ve seen in a magazine using a typewriter.

I do like the notification aspect of RSS and, in that regard I’d rather use the Google Personalized Home instead of a dedicated reader. I put my favorite blogs and new sites visible as widgets on the page and I got notified about new content. If I want to go further and read the full article, I just click to go on the author page.