Ehsan Nourbakhsh’s Blog

Almost a month ago Google changed its Google Reader product by removing one of its core features: social sharing. This feature allowed you to share items you had read in Reader with your ‘friends’ in Reader community. You could also follow them, comment on their items and so on. Since your comments and notes were only text, the communities were formed around type of ideas they embraced rather than looks. Furthermore, your semi-anonymous Reader identity made the concentration on context more emphasized. In my personal opinion, the resulting network enjoyed a much more intellectual atmosphere than other more sophisticated social networks do.

In order to promote their main socail network, Google Plus, they eliminiated Reader’s features with no provision of seemless migration. I can see this as an engineer’s assumption that new “toys” automatically attract new people. Marketing people might disagree, pointing to brand loyalty.
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This summer I had to use Outlook 2007 with Microsoft Exchange server. It was also integrated with Cisco’s WebEx. This combination was so efficient that I started to wonder why I did not use Outlook in school.

But after a one semester trial, I am completely disappointed. Apparently Outlook is not intended for use with an IMAP server. Each time it would take almost minutes to load messages. For Thunderbird, it was merely seconds on the same server.

Apparently Microsoft developers are aware of this problem, but it is not fixed yet. There are hacks and suggestion to improve it, such as this one. Unfortunately these “solutions” don’t fit my needs and I am back to using good old Mozilla Thunderbird.