Web applications don't come much easier to use than Google Reader, a good and free news-feed reader that's still growing in that incubator of neat new stuff, Google Labs. Those who love all things Google will latch right on to this one. It's certainly superior to its (also free but very rudimentary) counterpart in Internet Explorer 7. And compared with the venerable My Yahoo! feed pages, it looks sleeker, makes navigation easier, and simplifies compartmentalizing of news feeds—although it probably won't pull away users of that service. Likewise, that small, intrepid, news-feed-crazed crowd jonesing for every conceivable bell and whistle will still want FeedDemon.

I like Google Reader's simple interface, which has just a handful of menu buttons—Home, Read items, Starred, Subscriptions, Labels, and Share. Click on Subscriptions to get to the dialog for editing the list of feeds or to pick a single feed to view—its items will appear in a vertical scroll box on the left of the page. Selecting Home takes you to a "reading list" of all articles from all feeds you subscribe to. You can sort it by date or automatically by order of importance, and view all items or hide those you've read. Click on Read Items to see only articles you've viewed previously.

Choosing a particular article from any list will expand a fly-out window with a link to the original item (and often, a summary). Clicking on the link for an article brings up a separate window containing the story. An option in the fly-out window lets you categorize the item with a name of your choosing. When you want to see only stories in that category, click on Labels in the Reader menu, and choose the name you assigned.

Adding a feed couldn't be easier. You can type a URL into the search box at the top of any Reader page, hit Enter, and if a Subscribe button appears—indicating a feed exists—click on it. Or you can enter a keyword and select the Search for New Content button—each result will have a Subscribe button next to it. Navigating through the reading- or subscription-list scroll box is easy using the supplied buttons (top, up, down, refresh, and page down) or keyboard shortcuts. You can also move down through the items by hitting the spacebar and move up by holding down the Shift key, then hitting the spacebar.

If you have a personalized Google home page, you can add Reader to it as a module by choosing the Add Content link, searching for Google Reader, and clicking on Add It Now in the appropriate result. Now, from within your personal page, you can scroll through and select article entries, go to an item's parent home page by clicking on the source link, and change settings (number of items to display, sort order, and more) by clicking on the Edit link. You'll find a few more features in the module than in the normal Reader. My favorite is the default for the way article entries open when you select them—a cartoon-like pop-up bubble that contains the headline, post time, a link to the original item, and the first line of the story. You can move up and down the item list using little triangles at the top and bottom of the module—but only one article at a time, which is annoying.

Reader hasn't finished percolating through Google Labs, so I wasn't surprised to encounter some quirky behavior in testing. The app didn't pop up on my Google accounts page originally, for example, but that problem seems to have been fixed. I also noted that clicking on my labels sometimes failed to open up any feeds. But these minor annoyances aside, I enjoyed playing with Google Reader. For those who haven't had much experience and just want to see the feeds without the technology, it delivers.