Why I’m not ready to move to Google Reader yet…
What RSS reader do you use?
I’ve been using Bloglines for quite a while, long before Google Reader hit the scene. I have approximately over 80 RSS feeds I read daily. Not a big number I grant you. I know Bloglines is not perfect (it uses frames FFS!) but it does nearly everything I need, except for one thing that has been bugging me for a while.
I have a number of feeds that fill up quite regularly but when I open them in Bloglines, it marks them all as read, before I’ve even seen the headlines of all the items and if it takes me 10 minutes to read through all the items, it’s kind of annoying if I don’t read through all the items at that time. I have to look at all items in the last “hour” and try to remember which ones I hadn’t read. But Google Reader, using all that Web2.0-ajax-funky-shit, will only mark an item in a feed read as you scroll past it! With Google Reader, I could just pop into one of these big feeds and read as much as I want and not miss anything!
Google Reader is much smoother and nice-looking. No frames for a start. But when I first tried Google Reader, it didn’t work in Opera so therefore it was an instant no-no. But now it does. So I went and imported my latest subscriptions. Easy peasy. But then I thought, if I’m going to start using a new tool I might as well organise my feeds, put them in the right folders, delete the ones I never read etc. Removing feeds easy. But I couldn’t rename a folder! I had to delete it and recreate it. Arg! Also, in one place tags were called folders and you can browse around your feeds using them, in another they are purely tags you have to add tags to feeds instead of adding feeds to tag/folders.
Bloglines has a nice drag and drop interface where you can drop feeds in the folders you want. Okay, so it’s not any more efficient than Google Reader or using a text editor, but it’s visual and augments the organisation process. With Google Reader, you have to select the feeds from a list of all the feeds. Yes tags are more powerful, but there seems to be a bit of drawback on the user-interface for managing them. You can filter but it just didn’t feel easy. I found it would be easier and quicker to modify the exported opml file from Bloglines with a text editor than try and use this interface. It was disappointing. Yes, I’m lazy. I could do all these modifications. But Bloglines works fine for me right now. I know the guys at Google will improve the Google Reader interface in time so I’ll just wait and see.
Guest
April 22nd, 2007 at 5:44 am
Bloglines is for people who like to obsessively manage things in folders.
Google Reader is for people who don’t care so much about micro-organizing but would rather read large quantities of feeds, quickly.
Administrator
April 22nd, 2007 at 7:17 pm
That is an interesting way to put it. So it looks like I want to “read large quantites of feeds, quickly” and “obsessively manage things in folders”.
The thing is, I’d happily use tags, as in Google Reader, over folders. But I just found the UI tiresome to orgainse stuff. On the main screen you have a tree folder-like UI for browsing your feeds but when you hit “manage subscriptions” screen you *only* have a list of check boxes. One small improvement would be the ability to “hide” by keyword like you can filter by keyword, IMO.
May 14th, 2007 at 10:24 am
[...] plan was to first write a entry about why I am now using Google Reader even though I had previously decided not to. But then, during last week, I saw this: Google Reader has been [...]