Digging against Google before midnight

As the last hours of Google Reader tick down, a helpful image appears on that forlorn site:

Just in time appears the Digg Reader.  I was skeptical, but decided to try it out upon the Naked Capitalism team’s recommendation.  (NC is a terrific economics blog)

So far, the experience is pretty good.

Digg’s Reader has some advantages, starting with a very clean layout:

Adding new feeds is a snap, as was ingesting my Google Reader OPML file.  Additionally, DR offers lets me organize folders easily.  More, it lets me quickly arrange feeds within folders – something Feedly still can’t do.  That’s very helpful for fine-tuning my RSS experience, especially for efficiently (I bump up the most salient feeds to the top of a folder).

Integration into the main Digg site is there, and could be nice.  The “Popular” rating might become interesting.

When I first launched the Digg Reader, it started eating up RAM like mad.  I tweeted about this, and the project’s CTO responded.  Now memory use is way down.  That’s excellent, Digg people.

It’s not ideal yet, though.  I can’t get the thing to display images or most podcast mp3 download links.  There’s nothing to indicate how many unread items there are in an individual feed, which means I need to click through each one.  And there’s no search.

But for now, Digg Reader is in my browser’s launch tab set.  I’m putting it through the paces, and maybe it’ll become my new research tool.  Bloglines is still running in another tab, and Feedly has my phone.