I’ve been using Bloglines to read my news for a while now. Given that I use several different machines, a web-based feed reader is perfect. No matter what machine I’m at Bloglines knows what RSS feeds I’m subscribed to and what news I’ve already read. It allows me to organize by category, rename feeds, and provides a nice Firefox/Mozilla extension for automatically detecting RSS feeds on a page and giving a nice context menu for subscription. It looks like this:
Notice how it’s displaying more than one feed in the vertical preview pane. Rather than clicking on an individual feed, I had clicked on the “Technology” category which had multiple unread feeds. Given that I currently subscribe to 131 feeds, this is an essential feature for me. I can very quickly skim an entire category of feeds by simply scrolling down rapidly and stopping when I want to read something that catches my eye. I can even use the “A” keyboard shortcut to load all unread items in my entire blogroll. This is a huge time saver. Contrast this interface to Google’s new reader:
Its interface is similar to most mail clients: you click on one subject at a time to read the contents. It’s much more time-consuming to read all the news. I have to either click on each item or skim based on the subject.
Idea for Email Clients: It occurred to me that an interface similar to bloglines would be fantastic for mail clients. I probably wouldn’t use it to read my personal mail, but it would be well suited for reading mailing lists where you have a high volume. If I could view the contents of an entire thread (or even the whole mailing list) in one pane and simply scroll rapidly through it, I’d probably miss less important mails. Currently to save time I skim based on the subject of an email.
Update: eoin pointed out that Gmail does let you hit “expand all” to view all messages in a thread. I had forgotten about that since I don’t really use webmail much. It would be a nice feature for a native client like evolution.
October 17th, 2005 at 12:08 pm
I feel exactly the same way. I imported all my Bloglines subscriptions into Google Reader and tried using it exclusively for a week, but quickly got annoyed with how much longer it was taking me to read all my feeds.
October 17th, 2005 at 3:24 pm
“an entire thread (or even the whole mailing list) in one pane and simply scroll rapidly through it”
Isn’t this what gmail does.
October 17th, 2005 at 3:42 pm
Actually, yes. gmail does let you “expand all” for a thread. I don’t really use webmail much, though. I was basically thinking it would be a nice feature for evolution.
October 17th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
I too tried Googles RSS reader but stuck with the Bloglines. The one thing I like about Bloglines is that you can see how many unread feeds you have in each folder you have created, or how many unread feeds you have in an individual object if you have the folder expanded.
I have 134 feeds and using Googles RSS reader was way to cumbersome for me. I like being able to see how many new/unread items I have in each folder and picking what category I want to quickly skim through. Google makes you try to skim through all your feeds all at once…and even then it’s hard to just scroll through them all with there current setup.
July 11th, 2006 at 1:51 am
I tried goog reader but i hate the fact that it forces me to run through each and everyone of the news item. Now, i’m using netvibes which is a god-send.