Google Reader’s Email Function Forces Use of Gmail
Inspired in part by my colleague Adam Nash’s post on Google Reader, I made the switch a few weeks ago to Google Reader and have been entirely pleased with the clean UI and overall ease of use.
I’ve been using the Email function (see screen shot above) recently but, silly me, just fully realized that Google Reader is integrated only with Gmail. Lifehacker’s post on the integration characterized it as making it easy to share blog posts by email, and I agree that it is, indeed, easy — particularly if Gmail is your primary email application.
But I resent the forced lock-in to Gmail, especially because I predominantly use Yahoo for personal email. Bloglines and Feedburner, in contrast, allow the user to choose the “from” email address. I understand why Google would chose to integrate in this manner, but I don’t have to like it. The forced Gmail usage certainly fuels the Google is evil debate.
