Who’s using Bloglines?

So, randomly, I decided to check out Bloglines. Randomly, because I don’t really use an online RSS reader - I use Firefox’s live rss feeds for my desktop and I have a reader app on my Treo that downloads my feeds periodically. I actually discovered Bloglines off that strange Blog Juice calculator that seems to care about Bloglines, made me wonder what it was all about. I put in an add to bloglines thing in my leftnav, since it seemed to be something that lots of people use, but is it really?

I know I say this about many sites, but I wish Bloglines looked nicer. Doesn’t have to be super fancy, but it kinda looks like one of those olde thyme sites sites from the late 90’s using frames. That’s just me. Nevertheless, it seems like an interesting blend of functionality. The feed reader is just one basic part - pulling in your feeds and letting you read ‘em. That functionality is, I find, just ok. You can read each feed, but it’s hard to look at them in aggregate if you want. You can group them together in a “Playlist” and view them all in separate panes (glimpse view), but that involves a lot of clicking to go through any significant portion of posts. And a playlist in list view shows them all by feed, so there’s no easy way just to go through all your feeds chronologically like you can in Google Reader. And there’s no view just of headlines in list view, either.

What I found really interesting, though, was that they had the ability to create “email feeds” where you’d create a “feed” and Bloglines would give you an email address. Anything sent there would show up as an item in that feed. I’m not sure exactly what I’d use that for, but I just discovered it. It certainly seems like something that could be put to very cool use.

And then they have the clippings thing that let’s you easily take elements and posts from the blogs in your feed and link them into your bloglines blog or simply store them in a list for future reference. Which is kind of meta and cool, if you ask me. That is, your bloglines account besides being a feed reader, can also be your own public facing blog. Alternately when you’re just saving it (instead of putting it on your blog) it competes with Google Notebook - and I’m not sure that it comes out on top, since notebook works everywhere, not just within the app.

I think, overall, it’s an interesting product. To me it seems to sacrifice some reader functionality for additional functionality like the email feeds and being a blogging site. Since I don’t really need that (unless I think of something really cool for the email feeds) I don’t find it a compelling choice. If I was going to an online reader I’d go with Google Reader. However, if those additional features are something you’re looking for Bloglines may be the way! I know a ton of people are using it - is there anything I’ve missed? What do you think of it?

Jul 14th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: blogs · review · web app