Review: Bloglines Beta (v. Google Reader)
Now that I’ve switched to Google Reader full time from my half-baked system of Firefox Live Bookmarks (which I still use and love) and a few feeds in my ex-Palm Treo 650’s news reader, I’m interested in online feed readers. I had checked out Bloglines before but was left unimpressed - as a reader it suffered although it added some sharing/community type features that make it unique. For me though, I already have a blog, so I’m only interested in it’s feed reading abilities.
The Beta, which hasn’t rolled out these Bloglines particular features currently is only a feed reading platform and the reviews on the webs that I’ve been seeing have been generally positive, if not overwhelmingly so, so I figured I’d give it a look see. The first thing you notice when you go to the site is that it’s a lot better looking, if not gorgeous it at least looks like a respectable website now.
The setup is quite similar between the beta and the live site, though. It has a left pane that lists all your feeds, you can organize them into folders as you wish. One new feature is that you now have a somewhat customizable start page where you can drag feeds into the main right pane and their five most recent headlines will show up - each in it’s own box. This carries through to folders as well, if you are in the “quick view” of a folder you’ll see these boxes for each feed in the folder with 5 headlines. There’s no options to customize the number of headlines, but it does ajax up the summary if you mouse over the headline.
There are also now three viewing options for feed reading an individual feed or folder. Quick View, as mentioned above, gives you those 5 line summaries for a folder, but for an individual feed it lists them all. Expanded view lists all the posts in both cases, but if it’s a folder it groups them by feed, so you first see all of one feed, then all of the next, etc… And in 3 pane view it divides the main pane in half with the top part the Quick View style, clicking on an entry shows it in the lower pane.
The main problem is that with many feeds it is difficult to go through them all since there’s no unified view of all your feeds. You will have to click into each feed or folder. This alone is a killer for me, there’s simply waaay too much clicking around the site to go through everything. Google Reader handles all this nicely giving you a unified view of all your posts in total or in a folder. The start page and quick view folder pages in the beta are nice - but nothing that I’m dieing for. I’d probably use it if Google Reader offered it, but maybe not.
Another thing I dislike about it is how segmented everything is. Every feed is kept very distinct and boxed off from every other feed. In general, when I’m reading, I just want to go through all my feeds quickly - in G Reader this is really easy. They’ll show you all your unread (or whatever) entries from all your feeds (or all feeds from a folder) and you can look at them in list or expanded mode. This is really fast. To do the same in Bloglines, you’d have to put every feed into a single folder, which would then prevent you from organizing your feed in any other way, since folders don’t nest.
Given that, I think that interleaving feeds vs keeping them distinct is probably just a preference. I like all my posts ordered by time regardless of the feed so that I can read all the most recent stuff, if I’m in a hurry. But I can see how one might prefer to read them in feed order.
Overall, I’m pretty unimpressed with the Beta. It did provide a much needed redesign, but functionally it doesn’t seem much better. A little drag and drop for the homepage, and a much needed Quick View, but really not much else. However, since so much of the functionality hasn’t been ported (all the neat clipping and email stuff) it’s more than likely that there’s a lot more features coming, so I’ll keep my eyes on it. Unless you’re already a Bloglines user, at this point I’m not sure it offers anything compelling over Google Reader.
