Is Google Reader for Reading or Search?

I just looked at Google Reader and realized this event now occurs about 1-2 times weekly, usually for about 15 minutes at a time. (Which, I should note, is probably more time than I spend on my Twitter stream.)  I am simply not in a mode where I am bored often, which is the only time I check in to either of these services.

My first instinct was that maybe I should prune my subscriptions in Google Reader and Twitter, but with Google Reader’s awesome “sort by magic,” I get a lot of good content even if I only spend a minute or two checking my top items.

One item I liked today was a post about some new advanced Google Analytics features, which I felt compelled to star. I liked the article, knew that it would come in useful at some point, but was in the middle of some low level background queue implementations and my mind was not in web analytics mode.  Starring it made me realize that Google Reader is now a repository I store things I want to come back to later, not just a place I come to see what’s new.

This realization made me remember how great the search features of Google Analytics–this app really has the power to be your own personalized search engine.

So my new approach, rather than pruning, is import and index as much as possible, use “sort by magic” to relieve boredom, and leverage the search power of this app.

In a conversation with my friend @lessin the other night, he mentioned he was caching his Twitter and Facebook home streams to his local machine.  I trust Google’s redundant servers a lot more than I trust my old laptop, so I am trying a similar setup inside Google Reader and get a search index on all of this for free.

I’m not totally satisfied with my current setup. I’m importing some of the Facebook feeds mentioned here and playing with the rss cloud setup Dave Winder discusses here. While this opml file is pretty slick, it doesn’t update as I add/remove friends on Twitter. And the Facebook feeds I’m using don’t capture everything.

Does anyone have better solutions for getting Facebook and Twitter home streams via RSS?

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