If I were to be an application in this weird weird world of Web 2.0(that's four Ws), I would be Gmail or Google Reader.

Gmail can also be called as old wine of email in today's Ajax world. But Google Reader, is set to become one of the most useful and dominant tools of the near future. The ever expanding world of the web has so much information in itself that its already too much for someone to handle and feeds are probably the only way(as of today) to get one's information world under control.

Dave Winer, the RSS champ, should be a happy man. We are going to see more and more people in the future joining the RSS club.

To read a thousand websites in one single app, it takes a neat reader with an unbeatable User Interface. Google steps in. Google Reader's version 1 and 2 are certainly masterminded applications with a good insight and understanding of the present web. I still remember what was written here when GReader's first version was introduced. Today Google Reader is undeniably the number one feed reader for the web, given that they just introduced a search bar also with it. Some users like Scoble track nearly 600 feeds through GReader already.

If you are newbie to the RSS/Atom/Feed world, just logon to Google Reader and subscribe to a bunch of sites. You might want to start with personal weblogs that will help you come back and login to GReader everyday. Also if you are a mobile internet user, Google Reader has a fantastic interface that you will be addicted to. I browse the reader, on my cellphone and that's how I read most of the tech blogs. It is such a darling of an app.

Check the Reader and I'm sure you will never come back here. Rather you would read this blog only through its feed. Truly, don't even bother to visit those personal blogs, especially the ones with 4 lines of blogpost and 40 advertisements blocks around it. There is no free lunch so don't provide free advertising dollars for those loser blogs. Make them earn it. If the content is really appreciable, check their site regularly else feed reader is should be more than enough.

There are also other extreme users who end with a lot of feeds but never read them. I'm a heavy GReader user and from the experience of using feed readers for quite some, here are some tips that I keep a check on the information overload.

1) Don't allow the count of unread posts on each feed to grow beyond 100. You will never read any of them. Instead mark them as read and move on. You are not losing anything, trust me. If you end up marking them unread for more than 5 times, just unsubscribe the blog. If you subscribe to feeds like Digg or Del.icio.us, they will grow beyond 100 in a single day. Be sure that you need them and you will read them in future, else unsubscribe right then.

2) Be truly diligent of what feeds you subscribe to. Just because a nerd around you bullies you by referring to Slashdot, you don't have to subscribe to it. Though how much ever you want to read the blog, you may not have time or the blog is awfully boring. Exercise your right of un-subscribing. Think of it as one way of taking revenge of blogs of boredom. No Mercy.

3) Make a habit to login once a day. If you aspire to be a go-getter of tech world, which is, as of today, nearly impossible, login to reader once a day and try to get rid of the posts by reading it. Procrastination is evil. By the time you ge to read about the 5th generation IPods, Jobs would have already introduced the 8th generation PODs and IPhones will cost $50 a connection. It's changing every nano-second. Read it once-a-day.

4) Read posts using the list-view. Not the expanded view. This will enable to read the title and then decide if you want to really read the post. Don't read all the posts of all the feeds. It's a crime of time. With that extra time, you can crack the solution of Petals Around Rose or watch Desperate Housewives Season 3 DVD, the dirty laundary edition with lots of extra footage !!

5) The last but the not the least(aargh...what a bad used-to-death cliche. Will someone ban those words - 'last but not the least'), don't have more 50 feeds to the max. If you are the owner of some gambling casino at Macau(not Vegas anymore), sipping martini in Honolulu, you can afford to read 250 - 500 feeds a day. For others, 50 hits the roof.

And yeah, don't bother to come to this blog, even though the blog has some nice random banners(are they ?) and no ads whatsoever. Read the feed.