Thursday January 18, 2007
Battle of the Online RSS Readers
This morning upon signing online for work I was asked what RSS reader I use (if any). I replied with Bloglines, to which my colleague responded with a frowny face. Apparently I am the minority, as the other members of my company use Google Reader.
I tried it once when it first came out and wasn’t impressed. I tried it again today and it is indeed improved, but I’m still not convinced.
Kevin, or any other avid fans, convince me. Why should I use Google Reader instead of Bloglines?
Posted at 1:19 PM |
1) All the cool kids are doing it.
2) It’s better.
3) SO much more efficient to use.
4) It’s constantly being updated.
5) Shared feed.
6) (reserved for some cool future reason)
7) It’s better.
8) I forget what 8 is for.
9) It’s googlier.
10) Everything.
I might concede to some of your points (especially 8), but…
3) How is it more efficient? When there is only one item that is new, I have to click on it to check the box, or activate the entry to use the “m” shortcut, or scroll it a bit with the mouse to get it marked as read, or do Shift+A. If there are TONS of entries, it is nice that it marks as read as you scroll by them instead of all at once like Bloglines, but for 1 entry, is there a faster/easier way to get it marked as read that doesn’t involve a bunch of mouse movement or Shift+A?
4) Bloglines is constantly updated now too and has been for awhile, so that point is moot.
5) Shared feeds are all fine and dandy, but I was annoyed when I added one that it defaulted to “unnamed feed” and I had to rename it, whereas in Bloglines when I added your feed it said “Kevin’s Shared feed from Google Reader” or something. How can Google Reader not know the names of its own feeds and Bloglines does??
2 | Posted by: Jennifer
on January 18, 2007 @ 1:46 PM
3) not sure i understand the problem…One tick of the mouse wheel and it’s marked as read for me…couldn’t be any faster way that I can see… The only faster way is to automatically mark everything as read, and that drives me so mad and makes me so angry i’d rather not read RSS at all.
5) Never had that problem, dunno. It added shared feeds that I added recently OK. So can’t really comment on that.
3 | Posted by: Kevin on January 18, 2007 @ 2:03 PMI use Klipfolio :)
Bad thing: it ain’t an online resource
Good thing: it runs on your desktop and gives you constantly in one view all your clippings :)
Well, I still use Bloglines sometimes, but I really mostly just click through on links from my site. At any rate, I can tell you that Bloglines often takes hours to let you (the reader) know I’ve added a new entry. I’ve sometimes logged off at the end of the day and a post from morning has yet to show at Bloglines. So…
8 | Posted by: Angela Giles Klocke on January 19, 2007 @ 4:55 AMI just tried Google Reader for the first time and am not convinced to switch from my tried and true reader of choice on Windows, Sage (extension for Firefox). Sure, it doesn’t let me sync what things I’ve seen/read, but it’s incredibly convenient. Also, and back to the topic at hand, Google Reader doesn’t seem to support authenticated feeds, at least as far as I could tell. As a subscriber to Daring Fireball, I gotta get my fireballs!
9 | Posted by: Dan on January 19, 2007 @ 6:01 AMOOH, excellent point, Dan! I hadn’t even thought about that, but I DO subscribe to an authenticated feed, and I didn’t even notice but it didn’t get added in the import process (presumably because Google Reader can’t support it.)
That’s a major shortcoming of the reader!
10 | Posted by: Jennifer on January 19, 2007 @ 10:19 AM
