October 8th, 2005 by Jemaleddin Cole

As men­tioned yes­ter­day, Google launched its Google Reader feed aggre­ga­tor, a com­peti­tor to Blog­lines. I guess it’s also a com­peti­tor to stand­alone feed read­ers, but I get the impres­sion that those are a very dif­fer­ent set of users.

I’ve used Blog­lines for quite a while, and I’ve grown to love being able to get to all of my feeds from any com­puter attached to the inter­net. Using a stand­alone feed reader would never work for me, since I spend about equal amounts of time on the inter­net at work and at home. At home I’m divided between two dif­fer­ent com­put­ers: my trusty Mac mini and my evil ema­chines PC. This puts me in three dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems in two dif­fer­ent loca­tions. Not some­thing you can do with NetNewsWire.

Having used Blog­lines for so long, and being such an infor­ma­tion junkie, I follow a lot of feeds. I was over 200 for a while, but I’ve set­tled down to 157. I prob­a­bly read about 300 entries a day between them, so I guess I’m what you would call a power user.

As such, I like the speed of using Blog­lines. Unlike Google Reader, it han­dles most of the work on the server side, though the javascripts that handle the frame-​based nav­i­ga­tion do take a few sec­onds to load on my work com­puter. Speak­ing of the frames, Blog­lines is ugly.

Not “magenta and green blink­ing lights” ugly. But “straight laced work persona” ugly. There’s very little style. The under­ly­ing struc­ture is table-​based which is fine, though markup-​heavy, and I can accept it. I just hate that when RAM starts get­ting tight on my old work machine, all that code starts bog­ging it down. But I have always been will­ing to for­give and defend their use of frames as a nec­es­sary nav­i­ga­tion evil. Until now.

Google Reader is pretty. The curves, the soft colors and the use of trans­parency make for a nice read­ing envi­ron­ment, espe­cially in Safari on my Mac. And there isn’t a table or frame­set in sight. Their key­board short­cuts are easy to use and remem­ber, and the scrolling list of entries makes for a pleas­ant inter­face. I love read­ing feeds in Google Reader.

But this is where it all starts to fall down for me. As slick as Google Reader is, I’m not sure how well it suits power users like me. Blog­lines allows me to exam­ine all of my feeds, see which ones have new entries (and how many) and pick and choose which ones to read now and which to leave for later. And the handy “keep all new” link allows me to real­ize that I don’t have time to read a set of entries and post­pone it for later.

With Google Reader, feeds are all thrown together into one big stream of con­scious­ness. With the huge number of feeds that I read, its nice to have them divided into little chunks in Blog­lines. I get to pick and choose what I want to read based on what I have time for: a few kottke remain­dered links when I have time to browse around, a single Engad­get arti­cle when I’m almost ready to walk out the door.

Google Reader feels like it’s more suited to people who are new to feeds than old pros like me. And while it’s a great idea to create soft­ware that new users can easily get into, when it comes to soft­ware, most ama­teurs even­tu­ally turn pro. Google Reader doesn’t seem to offer the kinds of advanced fea­tures that Blog­lines does.

But when it comes to man­ag­ing my feeds, I cer­tainly prefer the slick inter­face that Google came up with. It’s too bad that the number of feeds that I’m sub­scribed to seems to over­power my browser. Bloglines’ sim­pler system which does most of the work on the server seems to work better for me.

Of course, because of the hodge-​podged nature of the web, feed read­ing is never as clean as you’d like. I had hoped that the huge AI brain-​trust that Google has acquired would have worked out a way to tell when a feed entry had really changed and when it hadn’t – a prob­lem that plagues both Blog­lines and Google Reader.

But the sort of prob­lems that I have with Google Reader seem like the kinds of things that will get shaken out as they tran­si­tion from Labs to Beta to fin­ished prod­uct. With the stan­dard Google cone of silence in effect, it’s impos­si­ble to tell what they have planned for Google Reader or even how much time and effort they’ve put into it so far. If Gmail is any indi­ca­tor, I’m sure it will improve.

Which brings me to another advan­tage of Blog­lines: an API. Net­NewsWire offers Blog­lines inte­gra­tion and the Blog­lines Exten­sion for Fire­fox is a great way of keep­ing track of your feeds. Hey Google: whither the Google Reader Noti­fier (for Mac too, please)?

Luck­ily for us, none of these prob­lems are per­ma­nent. Web appli­ca­tions can be refined and improved with­out wor­ry­ing about down­loads or patches or piss­ing off users.

So which do I like better? Well, as much as I like to pre­tend that I’m a ratio­nal crea­ture who weighs the pros and cons of the matter, I’m in love with Google Reader’s inter­face. I don’t know whether it’s the key­board short­cuts or the ele­gance or the slick AJAX effects that hooked me, but they hooked me. If they can make it easier to browse indi­vid­ual feeds and toss in a public API, I’ll be as pleased as punch.

What can Blog­lines do to win me back? Ditch the 1997-era markup and inter­face and hire Coudal Part­ners or Adap­tive Path to redesign it. Really, when it comes to fea­tures, they have it all over Google Reader – but the inter­face is everything.

But what do you think?

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