I’ve been using Google before anyone ever knew what Google was and the general rule has been, Everything that Google touches has been gold…until now.

Google’s latest gig is an web based RSS reader. This isn’t necessarily revolutionary since blog lines and the like has been doing it for a while, but since it’s Google I decided to take whirl.

The first thing I tried to do was import my feeds from SharpReader. I exported the OPML file and then tried to import it. It failed and gave a nice error: Your OPML file could not be imported. Please make sure that it is correctly formatted and try again.

Great, that means nothing to me; at least tell me where your parser is choking at. There is no way that I’m inputting 36 feeds in by hand.

Second thing I tried to do was import my own feed by hand. I click on Add a Feed and then type in the feed URL: eddorre.com/rss.aspx. It finds nothing. The problem? I didn’t type in the http:// in front of eddorre.com. Why is this a problem? Name another protocol besides http that uses RSS feeds (I guess you can use feeds:// but what non-technical person knows this?). Shouldn’t automatically be smart enough to figure that out?

The next and last straw was attempting to delete my subscription to my site. it selected unsubscribe from the drop down list and answered yes to the dialog box. Nothing happened. I was still subscribed.

Speaking of un-subscribing…that’s exactly what I’m going to do with Google’s RSS reader.

Even if it is in beta, it shouldn’t suck this bad.