Day: October 9, 2008

One of the downsides of being an early adopter in some areas is that I’m a late adopter in many others. I was using a desktop RSS aggregator back in 2002 (Radio Userland, then NetNewsWire) and so came late to the web-based news aggregator market. When I did hop on board, I used Bloglines, one of the early web based aggregators, and so missed out on Google Reader. I’ve stuck with Bloglines because it works and because it works well on the iPhone.

Yesterday, Bloglines wasn’t working. I haven’t seen anything posted about this, but while the site’s UI was up I didn’t get any new results for any of my 175 feeds from about 11 AM on. So in the early afternoon I decided to give Google Reader a spin.

One of the nice things about feed readers is that it’s pretty easy to take all your feeds to a new reader, thanks to OPML (one of Dave Winer’s many innovations in this area). Most feed readers support exporting your feed list to OPML, a structured XML format, and support importing feed lists from OPML. So you can pack up your feeds and easily bring them to a new place–minimizing vendor lock-in. I did that with my Bloglines feeds and was up and running quickly in Google Reader.

One thing that struck me almost immediately was the poorer UI in Google Reader. While it uses the same left pane navigation–right pane reading metaphor as Bloglines, the left pane is cluttered with a bunch of stuff on the top–starred items, trends, shared items and notes, a big help pane, and THEN your list of feeds. Bloglines’ feed list takes up the whole left pane and is just your content–much easier to manage–while other information like your personal blog and “clippings” are in separate tabs. If you’re just interested in reading feeds, Bloglines’ navigation is easier and less cluttered.

The right pane UI is a little better too, imho. I find the separate drop-shadowed feed boxes in the expanded view (what NetNewsWire used to call “smash view”) distracting; Bloglines’ zebrastriped list is visually flatter and doesn’t get in the way of the content. And I can’t imagine a use for the list view for most of my RSS feeds; though perhaps the notification-only ones are better suited for this kind of presentation, I can’t imagine trying to read BoingBoing or even Krugman this way.

Google Reader does feel a little snappier–feeds update more frequently and quicker. But the reading experience is actually slower, because items don’t get marked as read on display, but only if you scroll them off the screen. That might be beneficial for some people, but I’m a quick scanner and like to run through the feed list quickly. And because Google Reader doesn’t fetch all the items in a folder at once, dynamically fetching items as the user scrolls, there’s no way to quickly scroll to the bottom and read everything all at once. You have to wait for the fetch to catch up, then scroll to the bottom again.

So this morning I was pleased to see Bloglines is back online. I’ll still test out the Google Reader iPhone experience, because there are things that don’t quite work for me in Bloglines’s. But I’ll be continuing to use Bloglines in my browser.