1. Oct 2nd, 2006

    Google Reader: switching over from BlogLines

    reader.png

    Overall, a great improvement over BlogLines. I’m not sure when the BlogLines team decided they were “good enough”, but apparently, they did, and Google Reader just came from left field with only a handful of improvements, but enough to win me over.

    Most people won’t care, but being the RSS junkie that I am, they make all the difference in the world. Want to know why I’m switching?

    Like an e-mail client, Google Reader only marks items as read when you actually read them. BlogLines marks all items as read when I open it up in the browser. Usually, BlogLines is right, except when it’s wrong. It’s wrong when I open my entire list of feeds, and run out of time to scan them all. So if I don’t know I have enough time to go through the entire list, I need to read one feed at a time, which only slows me down. When I don’t have enough time is when I least want to spend more of it chasing down feeds.

    BlogLines is also wrong when I read a long but interesting feed and start opening tabs all over the place, eventually crashing Firefox (Note: more stable than IE is still not stable enough), losing my read/unread list.

    The only way I can get through my 100+ feeds list is to scan all the items, quickly read some, and mark the rest for a second pass. I can do thousands of posts that way because I’m not stopping to read each individual post. I just mark posts I need to read more deeply, plan to blog about, add to my calendar, forward to people, etc. BlogLines does that as well, but even after last week’s fix, it’s still clunky.

    Google Reader has the same easy breezy way of starring important items, just like GMail.

    There’s a few things worth improving. For one, Google should stop with its folksonomy nonsense. GMail calls them labels, Reader (and everyone else) call them tags, and on top of that Reader has folders, which are tags for feeds.

    A count of starred items would be nice (same goes for GMail). If they’re stars, why are they so shy and hiding in the UI? My feed list is too big for the main page to be useful, maybe they’ll improve on it over time. Meanwhile, I just bookmarked the “all items” link and open up Reader straight in that page.

    Auto-sort looks like an interesting idea, I’m not sure how well it’s working right now. When I read river-of-news, I prefer if all posts from the same feed are lumped together so I don’t have to context switch.

    And they forgot the most important thing. An easy URL for adding new subscriptions. This one works for LiveLines (a Firefox extension), but it takes over a minute to subscribe:

    http://google.com/reader/view/feed/^U

    Hopefully Google Reader will get better – I’m sure they benefit from knowing what we’re reading. Either that, or BlogLines will do a Yahoo and copy its features.

    Printable PDF | Posted by Assaf Filed in general 4 Comments »

    1. Oct 2nd, 2006

      Paul Watson

      Thanks for the Livelines URL and the All Items bookmark URL tip. So far I am managing the change to Google Reader but it isn’t quite as convincing as other Google products. Hopefully it speeds up.

    2. Oct 3rd, 2006

      Assaf

      Day four, and I’m loving it even more. Although I noticed some quirks, slowness, and did the tagging feature disappear for a day or two?

    3. Oct 3rd, 2006

      Andre Lewis

      Hey Assaf. Were you able to import your BlogLines folder structure into Reader when you imported your feeds?

    4. Oct 3rd, 2006

      Assaf

      I didn’t have a folder structure in BlogLines.

      And I don’t really have one in Google Reader. I tried all the features, so the screenshot shows some folders I made up, but I won’t maintain them.

      I am using the tags, though, so I have individual posts tagged with “action”, “event”, etc.

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