I’ve been using Bloglines for ages as my preferred method for reading RSS feeds, but I think I may be ready for a change. Google Reader has been revamped to be much more useful than its previous suckful incarnarnation, and it now does two things which I really need: 1) It loads progressively— ie the more entries you read the more it loads, and 2) It sorts by newest even where there are multiple entries from the same blog. Check it out, especially if you’re already a gmail user:

With Bloglines, once the massive "all items" page has loaded then all entries on it are considered read, which means that if you get halfway through it but then close your browser, when you come back to it later you won’t see those unread entries again. If you have limited bandwidth as I do this also means the page can take a long time to load. Google reader loads 20 entries at a time, and tracks read items as you scroll down the page (also because by default it uses a newest-first order you are free to continue reading into older entries).

So dear Bloglines, screw you and your lack of innovation, there really is no excuse for not improving a web based application— unlike us poor sods in the world of desktop applications you have the luxury of rolling out a new feature any time you want, so when you fail to do this you piss me off. Google’s initial offering was crap, so they just replaced it with a better version, and you should consider doing the same.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 15th, 2006 at 11:21 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.