Did You Know You Can Use Gmail as a Feed Reader?

Feed Readers are the latest fashion when it comes to being kept up to date with what some people are doing (blogs and the likes) or with news from a source of your choosing. You don't have to manually browse top the site and then search for the category that appeals to you most. This way, they're all delivered to you on a pretty regular basis.

The only problem I've encountered and managed to get angry with is that the reader does not check for updates on sites as soon as they are released, and that could lead to you receiving the feed seconds from the moment it was released, or, if you're not so lucky, hours later. If you need to know, you need to know when it's hot and steaming, not when you've already heard about whatever it was from a mate.

Google has its Reader working under the same principle above, but all truth told, it has recently introduced a tooltip that lets you know the time the article was published and the time you received it. However, Gmail is more appealing as a feed reader, because you can have it pull certain feeds every 5 minutes, if you have the right tracker script installed. It's a bit more complicated, but it gets the job done a lot better.

The new post will then be emailed to you (and thus, you'll be notified if you're running the Firefox Toolbar Gmail Manager) and if you want to, and you will, it will be moved under a label so you don't get your inbox filled everyday and go from a couple of carefully ordered pages to a couple hundred chaotic ones in a few days - that, of course, depends on how many feeds you'd be subscribed to.