OK fine… I always suspected this would happen, but now it’s official. Today will go down in history as the day that I finally admit that Google Reader is better than Bloglines. Interestingly, Bloglines was partly responsible for their own undoing. The last few times I tried using Google Reader, I was turned off by the method they used to mark posts as “read” and since this is pretty much the most important thing in a RSS aggregator, I elected to stick with Bloglines. But recently Bloglines rolled out a Beta version that works pretty much exactly the way that Google Reader does and after forcing myself to give it a try for the last few weeks, I finally got my head around why it works that way.
So at this point, with my main objection to Google Reader lifted, I just needed one good reason to make the switch. That reason came this week in the form of Google’s “Recommendations” functionality, which proved to be much more accurate & useful than a similar feature on Bloglines. So I exported my current subscriptions as OPML from Bloglines and into Google Reader they went. At this point I recalled my *other* main objection to Google Reader in the past, which was that their Mobile version kind of sucked, compared to Bloglines. This was less of a deal-breaker for me, but after checking the current version of the site out on my phone, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had made a lot of progress in that department as well! (The key here is to bookmark the “tags” page, instad of the start page, as this will format your feeds by category, instead of a big, flat list that’s useless to anyone with more than 3 subscriptions).
UPDATE: And did I mention how much *faster* Google Reader is? OMG! This post showed up on the mobile version about 30 seconds after I posted it, compared to Bloglines often taking several hours to pick up posts! (Especially on less heavily trafficked sites like my own ;)
UPDATE 2: Also worth noting: Google Reader displays embedded videos and Bloglines doesn’t (even in their new Beta version!)
0 Responses to “You Win Again”