Tuesday, 09 January 2007

• Google Reader vs. Bloglines

  Monsur asked me to explain why I prefer Google Reader (GR from now on) over other online feed aggregators, such as Bloglines (which he prefers). I'm not particularly good at articulating why I prefer a certain service over another, but I'll try. Keep in mind that I use GR constantly, while my observations on Bloglines are based on my long-ago brush with it and cursory glances at it while I write this entry. Feel free to school me if I get something wrong.
  

  The River of News
  

  GR lets you read all of your news, from all of your feeds, from one view, as a "river of news" - regardless of how you have them organized. It's intelligently sorted so that newer items from low-volume feeds take priority over newer items from high-volume feeds, or you can choose other sort options if you prefer.
  

  A long time ago, when GR first launched, I went gaga over the river-of-news feature - and then I waffled and decided I hated it. I felt like I could never get through everything. This was actually a failing of the original GR UI, which presented a list of items in a tiny box on the left, with the item you were currently reading appearing in the right. It turned out to be clumsy and unusable. The latest version of GR, however, works perfectly for this, with folders and feeds on the left, and complete items on the right. If you're in a hurry, you can collapse the article list and only read the titles, expanding only the articles that grab your attention.
  

  Bloglines, by comparison, requires you to select each feed individually in order to read the items, unless you're content with reading short title excerpts in the 'playlist' view.

  Tagging

  Monsur contends that Bloglines' playlist view offers a superior tagging experience over GR, but I beg to differ. It's true that you can apply several "tags" to a feed by using Bloglines' playlists, whie GR allows only one tag per feed. But as far as I can tell, Bloglines offers no way to tag an individual item.
  

  That implementation doesn't work for me, and here's why: most of the feeds I read are either topical or can be put into logical groupings. I don't really have a need to apply multiple tags to an entire feed. For example, my Python programming feeds are tagged 'python', my Flickr, video, and audio feeds are tagged 'audiovisual', and my Xanga feeds are tagged 'xanga'. For me, this is enough categorization for the feeds as a whole. I can click on one of those tags (accurately represented as folders in the GR UI) and read, as a river-of-news, all of the feeds assigned to it. If an article on one of those feeds wanders off to a different topic, or otherwise warrants further categorization, I can assign additional tags to that item. This works perfectly for me.

  Rojo offers an even better tagging implementation... limitless tags for feeds and individual articles. The site also has some impressive social features. But, as Monsur mentioned, the site is pretty slow. Slojo? :)

  Which brings us to...

  Speed

  Monsur finds GR to be slow. The only slowness I've ever experienced with the current version of GR is the occasional pause while it does a background AJAX refresh in the article list - and I tend to notice these things more than other people because of my crappy 500kbps-on-a-good-day internet connection. Usually, the refresh happens while I'm reading something, and I don't notice it at all.

  I'd be willing to bet that, after a weekend away from the computer, I can scan through the entire 2-day backlog of news faster with GR's river of news than I could by clicking on folders and feeds in Bloglines.

  User Interface
  

  Frames, as implemented by Bloglines, were fun for about 20 minutes back in 1996. No thanks.

  GR's UI is very similar to the GMail UI, which, IMO, is the cleanest, bestest UI for managing incoming information in existence. Bloglines, by comparison, is cluttered and dated. (No, I will not specifically qualify those statements.)
  

  GR and Bloglines both implement keyboard shortcuts. GR's more-or-less follow the conventions for keyboard shortcuts in GMail, which I already use. Speaking of which...
  

  Single-Sign-On

  I use a lot of Google services, including GR, and they're all tied to a single Google account. Bloglines offers nothing that I find compelling enough to warrant the hassle of keeping track of yet another username and password.

  Saving and Sharing Items

  Bloglines lets you save items privately in a 'clippings' area, or publicly in a blog. Either option brings up a clumsy editor that requires you to click a lot of stuff before you can save or share the item. You can also compose your own entries in your Bloglines blog. The thing is, I don't need another blog.

  GR lets you save items privately via 'stars' - you star/unstar something with a single click (or keystroke), and you can go back and look at all of your starred items via a link in the GR UI. It's really handy for those 'read later' items.
  

  Public sharing on GR is done via a 'share this' link (or again, by a single keystroke). Shared items appear publicly in a nicely formatted bloggish-looking page (here's mine). You can also get to your shared items from the GR UI, and un-share them if you need to. You can't customize the public 'shared items' page, but that's fine with me... like I said, I don't need another blog, and I don't need to worry about tweaking settings on another blog that I don't need.

  And finally...

  Hackability

  You can tweak both GR and Bloglines with Greasemonkey and userscripts. What I've noticed, however, is that the bulk of available scripts for GR focus on enhancing and extending functionality, while the scripts for Bloglines are more focused on dealing with shortcomings.

  Ok, that's all I've got... which aggregator do you prefer, and why?
  

  • 11:15 AM
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