Google launches Google Reader

Another day, another Google beta project. This time its the Google Reader, an AJAX based web application intended for RSS reading over the web. Played with it for a few minutes but to be honest, I don’t find it very impressive and will stick with my Google Desktop way of subscribing to feeds. It does seem to be fairly integrated with Blogger and Gmail, however, so it does bring up an interesting “bundling” effect that is slowly but surely moving a lot of the classic desktop applications to the web. Makes you wonder how much harder desktop application ISVs will have to work to compete with AJAX and its ever-growing capabilities to deliver rich and rapidly deployable apps seemingly on-demand.

I know I’m not waiting, got a pile of AJAX and .NET books ready to go.