Google Reader not updating all feeds
I’m a big fan of RSS feeds. I’ve tried lots of different news readers to get the fastest, best experience from reading the RSS feeds I subscribe to. I won’t comment on how many feeds I subscribe to…it’s a lot. Over the last week I’ve been using three different news readers to see how they operate with my feeds. One big thing I’ve noticed. Google Reader may be web based to use on multiple computers, and may be fast, and may look nice, but Google doesn’t update all of my feeds. Either something is broke again (I went weeks with some of my feeds not updating and then they all updated), or Google just decides for itself what feeds to update and what feeds to ignore. One entire group of feeds has not updated on Google Reader for three days, yet the two other news readers I’m testing have shown a minimum of 15 new articles posted.
For someone who has to stay up on current events, Google Reader just isn’t cutting it. How do they decide when to update feeds and how often? No need to comment, that was more of a rhetorical question than anything. I know how often it’s supposed to update. Fact of the matter is, it doesn’t work. Why subscribe to RSS feeds if the feeds don’t update and you have to go to the website to look?
As an aside, I’ve also noticed the date/time stamp for Google Reader in some cases does not coincide with the date/time stamp of the actual article. In some cases, it’s way off (as in over 12 hours), in other cases, its several hours off. Again, not that big a deal but some of them are my primary feeds and I DO notice.