I have totally switched from Bloglines to Google Reader. This was the fastest switch ever. And the most surprising one too. You see, I’m spending more than half of every day in my feed aggregator. That’s a lot of time. Needless to say, Bloglines is one of my favourite tools. And we all know how difficult it is to move away from one. Especially, when it does the job.
As I mentioned earlier, I was going to try the new version of Google Reader. And so I did. I found myself two hours later glued to it. And couldn’t leave it. And what is even more surprisng, I haven’t checked into my Bloglines account ever since. It was an instant switch.
Bloglines is a great tool, but Google Reader is almost perfect. It has a number of its own little glitches and annoyances, but it works so great that I need no other.
And just in case you’re interested, here are the things I want to see fixed in Google Reader:
- Feed options. I have a whole bunch of feeds and it’s no fun going through all of them in one page. Bloglines has a nice way of managing feeds on a feed by feed basis. I just click to read the feed, and I have a nice feed settings link right up there. There is one in Google Reader too, but currently it only has “Unsubscribe” as the only action. This will probably change soon though. I am waiting for a way to change feed tags for example.
- Manual sorting. Google Reader now has this folder-like look with tags, like many other RSS readers do. The only problem though is that there is no way to sort tags, except for alphabetically. That’s way too limited. I need manual sorting. I want to have feeds from my friends and family up there at the top, no in the F-section (Friends, Family). There is a workaround to tag those feeds with _friends and _family, but it looks ugly and feels hackerish.
- RSS feeds for tags. There is a way now with Google Reader to mark every tag either private or public. And to easy embed items from a certain tag to a webpage, via just a couple of clicks. What I want instead, is to have an RSS feed for this tag. So that I can have a tag like “funny” and all items that I tag with it, will appear in the feed, which I could then share easily with my friends and family. That’s like forwarding jokes without annoying people. And, if it is in the form of RSS feed, it’s pretty easy to embedded into the website too.
That’s about it. Oh, well, there is a little bug with new items counting, but every RSS reader that I’ve seen passed through this stage at one time or another. With all the smart people at Google, I’m sure it won’t take them long to fix it.
It’d be interesting to see how many people migrated from Bloglines to Google Reader. Particularly every “blog giant” like Lifehacker, SEOmoz etc wrote about it…30-40% of the users has Bloglines lost or more?
I don’t think that the numbers are THAT high, but surely plenty of people tried out the new Google Reader. I’d say maybe 15-20% of Bloglines active users migrated at best. Maybe less. People hate to change.
It’d be nice to see some stats indeed.