I’m a few days late on this, but I think the new Bloglines updates are really slick, they’re subtle but they really improve the usability of the product. Bloglines is my favority aggregator, online or offline, and I admire the restraint they have. It would be easy for them to add every possible feature, instead they keep things simple and, since January, fast. Simplicity is far harder than complexity. Especially in a big organization.
What about the new Google Reader?
I was pretty much ready to switch to Google Reader, but then Bloglines made some really nice tweaks yesterday. Now I am not sure which to use, I’ll give it a few days of playing with both. I do know I have tried to switch many times before, but always came back to Bloglines. Only time will tell.
The guys over at bloglines have pretty much always tried to keep things simple. I think that’s a major key to their success.
I was never able to get into the Google reader, but I haven’t played with the redesign much.
One of the things I liked about Blogline’s updates is that they didn’t try to redo everything under the sun, like most folks do in a redesign. They just chose one element that people interact with a great deal, and made a logical and functional iteration on it.
I couldn’t agree more, love the new enhancements…Bloglines feels much quicker and more responsive now. Great example of a subtle use of AJAX to truly improve usability, rather than just doing it because you can. I sent the Bloglines dev team a kudos comment congratulating them on their great work.
The recent changes in Bloglines were subtle and yet very noticeable (in a good way) at the same time. Everything just looked clearer and nicer. I use Bloglines every day.
I must agree on the love for bloglines. I especially like the (vim-like) hotkey navigation. This makes my daily feed reading whizz past with minimal hand motion. And the support is great too. I recently requested a hotkey to toggle the ‘Keep new’ status on the current message, and a few weeks later I suddenly noticed that they had silently added the ‘n’ key 😀
A big thumbs up for bloglines!
I used to use Bloglines. I started not long after they opened up. At the time, I thought they were great. They added great features and there really wasn’t a better way to keep up with sites no matter where you were.
Then Ask.com bought them. I thought, OK, maybe this is a good thing…
Nope, Bloglines is buggy. The “Keep new” feature seems to work sometimes and others the flagged posts seem to be lost forever.
So I see this post, and think: “Well, maybe they have cleaned up their act.” So I updated my feeds there and let Bloglines start gobbling posts. An hour later, I hope back to the site to check out what’s new. I click on a folder to see the posts of the sites that are in that folder. The “new” count goes away or decrements but no posts. I click again, the new count goes down again. Click, count drops off completely. Click one last time… Now all the posts that were new appear. :blink: I go to another new posts folder and click. The new count goes away but no posts. Click again and get the posts.
This is a new behavior that Bloglines never did before. So, once again, I’m back to NetNewsWire and desktop readers until something that works and works well comes out… 🙁
The new Google Reader revamp makes it very similar to bloglines. They’re basically the same now, though I’ve switched to Google Reader for now just because the interface seems a little more slick. I’d recommend giving it a try. The original Google Reader was HORRIBLE, but this redesign did an excellent good job of making it usable.
I agree. It’s funny, about a month ago, I tried to switch back to a desktop aggregator on my mac, having used bloglines for years and netnewswire before that. I couldn’t do it. The new enhancements are subtle, but very helpful. Tip o’ the hat to the bloglines team. I’m not going anywhere.
Bloglines saves so much time, I don’t think I’ll switch to Google Reader. I tried using it before the redesign, and it just isn’t nearly as good. Bloglines has changed the way I read. I’m much more informed now.
Z, your right. Google’s Reader is much better than before. Light years better. I’ve moved my feed list over there and am quite pleased with the way it works.
I’ve been giving web-based aggregators a try since friday.
Started with Netvibes. Slick UI but slow-slow-slow for updates.
Tried to import my feeds to Google Reader and it didn’t work.
Now using Bloglines. UI is much worse than Netvibes, but you can’t beat the fact that it works and it’s fast for updates… although there is a lag between when an update happens and when it propogates to Bloglines that can wreck havok if you’re trying to get a first comment in on a website.