Richard, what's wrong with frames for a newsreader? With a regular site, that's no good, but for a feedreader it's great.

Oh, of course, Ajax came along. But *does that mean they have to change so they can ride the waves of the hype?*

There's one other web-based aggregator I'm aware of: Pluck.com which started life as an IE-only add-on, and only later created a web version. As I understand it, they've received lots of VC money, but to date their product is basically a second-rate copy of Bloglines. THey seem to have no interest in stuff like web standards, open APIs, or any of the stuff that RSS geeks might get excited about, yet they've certainly not done anything special to attract other types of customers. Bizarrely, the word is that they think their main competition is del.ici.ous.

I can't bring myself to try Rojo almost entirely because of their butt-ugly design. The whole thing manages to look overly complex and amateur at the same tie. But mostly I just refuse to spend any part of my day looking at that fugly logo and red color scheme.

Regarding tagging (just curious) - at the feed level or post level? One might be able to consider the folder heirarchy that Bloglines employs as a ruidmentary tagging mechnaism, but it's far from flexible.

It would be nice if Bloglines opened up the system to be compatible with other systems a bit more - it's nice to be able to make a Bloglines clip blog, but many use other services. Bloglines does give off the walled garden feeling a bit too much - many links lead not back to the content itself but to somewhere else within Bloglines.

Part of the problem is that all these linking/clipping services (del.icio.us, Spurl, etc) have different API's for accessing their services. If we had a unified standard API, like the MetaWeblog API (just as an example) more integration with various services would be possible.

My guess is the reason you don't see many competitors is most people don't need all of the functionality of a "full-featured Web-based RSS Aggregator". It simply overshoots the needs of the common user. And, of course, where's the revenue?

And counter to the claim of reducing information overload, aggregators like this actually CREATE information overload. It is like having a whole new inbox of unread items to contend with.

So while I agree that it doesn't mean Bloglines should use Ajax (just because it's cool), I maintain that frames are clunky and not very user friendly.

To Greg's question, tags at post level. But again, I'm not necessarily requesting tags just because they're the hen's teeth right now. It's just an example of the innovation they *could* be doing to the Bloglines UI and functionality, rather than sitting on their market lead and not doing anything. Hmmm, that reminds me of a certain web browser ;-)

Best,
Brad Neuberg

Seriously though.. just use Rojo. If there's a feature you HAVE to have send an email to feedback@rojo.com and we'll probably add it.

Kevin

Richard - I hear ya'. Evan Williams recently made a comment that a lot of the perceived problems with feed consumption are UI issues, there is admittedly a lot of work to be done.

I don't believe anyone is sitting still, even/especially Bloglines.

Which other web-based readers will this post bring out of the woodwork? ;-)

Cheers,

John

I hope I can show you my idea within 2 monthes :)

Datou@China

However, I am getting more and more intrigued with NewsGator. My question is not what will kill Bloglines but what service will realize that I what to read news on a desktop, the web AND my mobile device. They seem to understand that need.

It's dissapointing though at how many comments here imply that a good-designed RSS reader will have the most features, or that features will be added at the request of any random customer. Not to say that these aren't thoughtful smart people behind these products, but it's not clear that anyone really has a *vision* for how to make feedreading substantially better than it is now. Adding features won't do it.

Provide a solution and keep it simple.

Anyways, we have a number a projects underway here at Bloglines to improve the user experience. It's actually our number one priority. Not just new features like package tracking, which was recently rolled out, or weather forecasts, which will be rolled out next week. But improvements to the UI and better ways of dealing with information overload.

All of your comments are much appreciated, and as in the past, they will help us continue to improve the system. Reading this thread is just one more reminder of how many aggregator developers are out there; we always need to be moving forward.

And yeah, LiveJournal might be the most popular web-based aggregator that's RSS/Atom enabled.

An exceprt: "The problem with a lot of feed readers is that they have a simple list-of-lists UI. None of them learn from past behavior to affect incoming information. You're just presented with a list of feeds, and a list of items in each of those feeds."

Sure, tagging would be a little "post-processing" work for the few "first finders" of feeds and posts but would accelerate information discovery for everyone else.

That's the power of tagging: The selfish impulse (of even a few) to tag stuff inadvertently benefits the whole community.

Case-in-point: Imagine you had never heard of the top blogs (see Technorati top 10 at http://www.technorati.com/live/top100.html). Based on their names alone (Boing Boing? Daily Kos?) you'd know almost _nothing_ about what they are about.

Instead, if your future feed reader let you know that other people had filed (i.e. tagged) the Daily Kos under "politics", wouldn't that aid your discovery of this resource immensely?

Likewise, tags would come to the rescue of the many, many ambiguously titled postings out there. For example, how many more people would read a post titled "Irreverence deemed..." (eh, Mike?) if they saw it flagged with the "Muppets" tag?

In short: Next-gen feed readers would rock with group tagging features.

I totally agree with your comments about tagging helping with the discovery of new information, if a Del.icio.us-like registry of tags is used to collect them. I do mention this in my first response ("...helps people leverage each others' attention...") though maybe I downplay its importance too much.

My personal difficulties in keeping up with RSS have been the opposite: I have so much stuff crossing my path every day that I need a system to help with lightening the load, not finding more out there. It's a little ironic that the biggest culprits for me are actually Del.icio.us feeds. I'm subscribed to "flickr", "map", "visualization", some individuals, and a few others, and lately I've been archiving them all un-read -- too much hay, not enough needle. Del.icio.us gives almost solely positive feedback, leading to a strong "stench of information" as Thomas Vander Wal calls it (http://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1592).

Presently the mechanism for finding good stuff is reputation-based: Daily Kos is a known-good filter for lefty politics, Boing Boing is a known-good filter for funny/weird links and copyfight sentiment. The Steve Gillmor article I reference describes these as "reputational thought leaders."

My hypothetically-awesome future revision of ReBlog would provide a small bit of negative feedback, by penalizing duplicate links, posts from feeds you generally don't read, etc. I think there's a lot that can be learned from Bayesian spam-filtering methods here, because they acknowledge the personal expectations of the individual.