Google Reader Play Shows Feed Items Like a Slideshow

Common people doesn’t know what is RSS, in fact many of my web savy friends are unaware of what an RSS reader is and how it can be used to monitor a lot of websites without actually visiting them.

If you belong to the same group and want an easy option to read blogs, watch videos and read content – try Google Reader play. It’s a new initiative by Google Reader team to provide an easy RSS experience, especially to those who don’t know about RSS and online feed readers.

Using Google reader play is simple as there aren’t any setups involved and you can start browsing content right after the welcome screen.

There is a thumbnail strip at the bottom of the screen and you can scroll through pages by clicking the arrows on both sides of the strip. Instead of the list view of feed items, you get to see only one item at a time. There are three buttons available – star, share and like and they can be used to share feed items with your friends or bookmark them for later reading.

Google Reader play lets you choose reading items from 10 different categories – Arts, Entertainment, News, Sports, Shared, Business, Health, Science, Technology and Recommended. The videos are auto-played and the images are enlarged which makes browsing really fast. You can read a particular feed item in Google reader play from the normal version of Google reader by clicking “View in reader play”

There is something different with Google reader play as it learns from your browsing habits and shows you items which might be of your interest. This is just like Stumbleupon but you can’t add “thumbs up” or see how many likes an item has received.

Overall, this version is not as efficient as the normal one, but consider it as an optimized version for tablet PC’s and iPad’s.