There's no doubt that Google Reader has improved a lot since its initial release - and is now at the forefront of innovation in browser-based Readers. Likewise I am fond of a few of the desktop readers, for example the Windows-based FeedDemon impressed me in my tests last year and the Mac-based NetNewsWire always gets rave reviews. Also a lot of people now use the start pages, like Netvibes and Pageflakes, as RSS Readers. Not to mention email subscribers and browser integration (Firefox Live Bookmarks, IE7, Flock, etc).
]]> The bottom line is that Bloglines has much more competition - and the RSS Reader market has changed substantially - since e.g. Read/WriteWeb's analysis back in December 2004 of this market. So my hunch is that most early Bloglines subscribers (of which I was one) have now switched to another Reader - and perhaps even a different type of RSS Reader. I wish Bloglines had kept up with its early innovation, but sadly it hasn't and so now largely relies on its first mover advantage to keep the momentum going.In any case, here's a quick poll which asks what type of RSS Reader you use currently - and feel free to back it up with comments.
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I highly recommend the use of Bloglines as a way to help students learn both about blogging and about RSS readers. I teach them blogging first, since they are highly motivated to learn about blogs... and then we learn about RSS feeds later, when they see how their own blogs come with their own feed.
I would find it very hard to use Google Reader for this purpose, since it is not fully integrated with Blogger.com, even though both - independently - are better than the options at Bloglines. the seamless integration of RSS feeds, blogging and blogroll at Bloglines makes it a winner for me!
Laura Gibbs
University of Oklahoma
MythFolklore.net
I can lock or flag individual stories, page through items with the down arrow and the keyboard shortcuts are intuitive. I can also import and export with a click.
]]>I've recently developed a new kind of web-based feed reader that focuses almost entirely on the pleasure of reading and removing distractions. This approach encourages a more free-flowing style of consuming everyone's news that is intended to be more like reading a good book instead of hammering through an application and knowing for sure that yes, that item was in fact read in that feed at that time.
The site is called RSS2.com and has been growing rapidly in popularity. There's no voting on items (I originally coded it to include voting and recommendations but then removed that feature since it distracted from the desired experience), simple ability to build a list of favorite feeds to read and the beginning of some interesting feed stats.
I also build a mobile version that is super nice for reading on a Treo when you're sitting around bored and want to catch up on what's going on right now.
Check it out and see if you like this more aesthetically-tuned approach to reading the news of the day. RSS2.com - Really Simple News For You.
Let me know what you think of it or if you have any suggestions to improve the experience.
]]>My wish would be that Flock and Bloglines would sync just as Flock's bookmarks sync with del.icio.us.
]]>For example: My Shared Items
]]>I think the survey here could be improved by asking two or three questions so that you could segregate between the various browser-hosted readers--as that seems by far the most popular category.
Thanks for the insights!
--Larry
http://www.LarryEiss.com
Here's what I've tried so far: I exported my Bloglines-Feeds and imported them at Findory.com as Favorites. From there I get personalized RSS-Feed which I've subscribed to in Netvibes.
Another problem I have is that I want to archive the stuff I read efficiently. I tried Newspipe to forward RSS item as email to an IMAP account. To bad there are issues with searching IMAP mailboxes with OSX Mail/Spotlight. I have to try it with Thunderbird yet.
Based on this experiments I'm working on my own solution which would include Newspipe's RSS2Email-forwarding and then fetching those with "mawih" into a wiki (http://mawih.rafelsberger.at).
]]>Sometimes I use Google Reader to discover some really inspiring
feeds via the embeded search function, and one big advantage of
using Google Reader is that you can listen to podcasts on the
stream without the fuss of downloading.
On my LINUX desktop, I find the widely-acclaimed Akregator not as smart
as it is said to be, the proxy setting nearly tripped me up and the UI is not that friendly. So in the Linux environment, i would opt for Google Reader.
I'm now comparing NetNewsWire Lite and Google Reader. I still love the Netvibes interface, but if I confirm that it's causing problems, I'll switch.
]]>At the moment I am VERY happy with NetNewsWire and NewsGator Online. They sync with each other, so I don't read anything twice, and I can still get to all of my news the way I like to when I'm at home or work.
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