Hitwise has released data that suggests Bloglines is still the clear leader in the RSS Reader stakes, with 3 times more US visits than its nearest web-based competitor Rojo. I don't think a lot can be gleaned from this data though, as it misses out desktop-based RSS Readers, start pages and a number of other types of RSS Readers. Also as Mike Arrington pointed out, Google Reader appears to be under-represented in Hitwise's stats. Indeed Google Reader is currently not being counted in Feedburner's stats and I agree with Mike that it is likely to be around the same level as Bloglines at this point. The non-reporting is a problem at Google's end and I understand Feedburner is doing its best to get Google to fix it.
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.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Friday Poll: What Type Of RSS Reader Do You Use?.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2965
Read/Write Web asked readers what type of RSS reader do you use? Web based readers such as Bloglines and Google Reader carry the day over desktop readers like FeedDemon and NetNewswire. Though intrigued with Google Reader, I still prefer my... Read More
The latest Read/WriteWeb poll has highlighted some interesting trends. We asked what type of RSS Reader do you use the most? Here are the results so far, from nearly 900 respondents: 1. Web-based (e.g. Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo) 55% (495... Read More
It's Saturday morning for me, Friday afternoon in Silicon Valley. Before I go off to the horse races this afternoon (because you needed to know that), here's a quick re-cap of the past week on Read/WriteWeb and in the Web... Read More
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I use Bloglines in my online courses so that my students can have an RSS reader AND they can blog. admittedly, the Bloglines blogs are very simple, but this is actually good: it's the easiest way to get started blogging that I can imagine.
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
Posted by: Laura Gibbs | January 19, 2007 1:15 PMUniversity of Oklahoma
MythFolklore.net
That's a great point Laura, Bloglines' user friendliness and ease of use still makes it a compelling product. And I remember speaking to Bloglines creator Mark Fletcher back at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference - and those things seemed to be top of his mind too.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | January 19, 2007 1:20 PMAfter trying nearly all of them, I ended up using SharpReader exclusively. No latency, I can filter, categorize, subscribe using drag and drop, receive or disable alerts, decide how long I want to archive items.
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.
Posted by: DG | January 19, 2007 1:37 PMI decided to build my own after being dissatisfied with the other options.
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.
Posted by: Gabriel | January 19, 2007 1:48 PMInteresting, I use QuickNews RSS client on my Treo as that is where I have the most need for RSS. When at work, LiveBookmarks in FireFox is sufficient.
Posted by: Antoine of MMM | January 19, 2007 1:49 PMI started off with Bloglines and still show others how to use it when I introduce them to RSS. But now, I use the Flock browser, and I like the integration of its reader.
My wish would be that Flock and Bloglines would sync just as Flock's bookmarks sync with del.icio.us.
Posted by: Brian Mull | January 19, 2007 2:37 PMGoogle Reader has supplanted any other reader I use. I was once a NetNewsWire/NewsGator junkie, but Google Reader continues to improve, and makes it easy to read all my data from any computer with an Internet browser. It's very solid. I also especially like the ability to import and export from OPML, as well as view my own reading and sharing trends.
For example: My Shared Items
Posted by: Louis Gray | January 19, 2007 2:47 PMI use Awasu (www.awasu.com)- started using a feed reader about 2 years ago - didn't know about all the other options then, and I kind of stuck with it.
Posted by: John S | January 19, 2007 2:55 PMI use bloglines...forwell over a year, maybe close to 2 years now? Maybe closer to 2.5 years? I lost track. I'm trying out Google Reader and there's some things about it that I don't quite like enough to switch, but I'm giving it time. I originally started off using a desktop aggregator in 2002 (i was a late comer to using it, but early adopter to supplying it from my site). I forget the name of the one I started with, but it wasn't a well-known one. It was made by some foreign guy as a little project of his. I think he was from Russia or Romania or something over that way. It seemed a decent number of people used it. Then, for some reason, I decided to change to a different one. I tried a few desktop products, and none of them were good enough for me. I tried a few online ones, and settled in with bloglines. That proved most useful for me, since I use 2-3 different computers regularly.
Posted by: Devon | January 19, 2007 3:01 PMI use a web-based client, but it's not mentioned in there. I use Newshutch (www.newshutch.com) and I love it.
Posted by: Kris Gosser | January 19, 2007 3:03 PMDitto on NewsHutch. Better browsing experience than all the mentioned tools.
Posted by: brian.leroux | January 19, 2007 3:07 PMHere's my favorite one: http://www.alesti.org/
Posted by: Carlo | January 19, 2007 3:12 PMI've tried a lot of rss readers and finally I've choosed this one, It's really fast and simple. Carlo - Italy
What about Original Signal (www.originalsignal.com)? It's a web reader and a portal of sorts... That's what I use 99% of the time, since I read most of the feeds it includes.
Posted by: Thomas | January 19, 2007 3:17 PMI am using the Google Reader, but I just upgraded IE on one of my boxes to Release 7 and I am interested in their reader, which appears to be a lot faster than Google's offering.
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!
Posted by: Larry Eiss | January 19, 2007 3:58 PM--Larry
http://www.LarryEiss.com
I have Tiny Tiny RSS setup on my intranet. It's webbased and keeps me in full control, i like it..
Posted by: Andrew | January 19, 2007 5:09 PMI've been from Bloglines to Rojo to Google Reader, which is where I am now.
Posted by: Andrew | January 19, 2007 8:05 PMBlogBridge. Desktop, Mac & Windows, works great, lots of great features, free. Surprised it's rarely mentioned in these polls.
Posted by: d52boy | January 19, 2007 8:41 PMSorry, bad html.
BlogBridge
Posted by: d52boy | January 19, 2007 8:47 PMOpera is my app-of-all-trades - for browsing, e-mail, and feeds. I love that it treats all my RSS items the same as e-mails, and provides the same great sorting and searching functionality for both.
Posted by: David | January 19, 2007 9:37 PMI use feedbite.com (obviously)
Posted by: shadilac | January 19, 2007 10:06 PMI'm a longtime Bloglines user, however, currently I'm looking for an alternative. I just can't cope with the load of messages, so I want to personalize my feeds.
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).
Posted by: Walter | January 19, 2007 11:03 PMI use Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) and I love it. Netvibes
Posted by: Charles Knight | January 20, 2007 12:16 PMprovides me with 40 search-related feeds all on one home
page that update easily; and it's very easy to use. I hope some of the folks reading this will give Netvibes a look!
I use the sync-possibilities of NetNewsWire (at home) and NewsGator (at work). Works great!
Posted by: Stefan | January 20, 2007 1:16 PMI like to scan all the news articles from all my feeds. As far as I can find, only FF Live bookmarks can do this. How else can you scan 30-40 feeds with other readers? Am I missing something?
Posted by: Julian | January 20, 2007 1:28 PMI use Protopage(http://www.protopage.com) The original super smart AJAX start page with RSS. Will not/can not do without it! 750 search engines and a widget showcase of 286, waiting for you to add one if you’re that way inclined.
Posted by: Kirsty | January 20, 2007 3:22 PMWell, I use the free desktop rss app GreatNews in my Windows desktop
most of the time. It is user-friendly, and has very nice features that
just suits to my needs. And it can keep the old feed archive for a long time and yet still navigates through the feeds freely.
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
Posted by: Addison | January 20, 2007 7:07 PMas 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 use the mac app NewsFire. I tried switching to bloglines, so I could browse on more than one computer, but eventually went back to newsfire - mainly because it saves every post and lets me search them in spotlight.
Posted by: Steph Mineart | January 20, 2007 7:28 PMI use QuickRSS. It's simple but it gets the job done :).
Posted by: Rub3X | January 20, 2007 11:33 PMI have been a big fan of Netvibes. I have recently begun to suspect that leaving it open for long periods of time slows down my machine (not just Firefox, but other apps as well). I've noticed this problem on my Macs at home and at my office.
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.
Posted by: Patrick | January 21, 2007 8:51 AMIt's said "If other please comment" I just use Web Clips in the Google Desktop, it's enough for me.
Posted by: Anton | January 21, 2007 11:30 AMOne of the biggest factors in me choosing a RSS reader was the portability. I'm not talking about a smartphone, but portability to other computers. For this reason I needed a web-based one, but Google Reader doesn't have private feeds (i.e. LiveJournal "protected"/"friends only" entries) so I can't use that.
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.
Posted by: Michael Janssen | January 22, 2007 9:52 AMI use FeedDemon now. Earlier I used to use Netvibes for all my reading.
Posted by: Ajay | January 23, 2007 9:55 AMWhat about news tickers/popup alerts/widgets/gadgets/rss->sms etc?
Posted by: Chris Saad | January 23, 2007 8:21 PM