David Emery Online

Feed Readers

4 September 2007

As many regular readers will know, feed reading is a fairly avid pastime of mine. For those of you that don’t know, a feed – commonly a RSS feed – is representation of a website that, when used in a feed reader lets you be notified when a website’s content changes (so you don’t need to keep checking yourself).

Like most people first coming to RSS I started out reading a handful of feeds in a desktop feed reader – NetNewsWire, to be precise. This worked out OK to start with, but the more feeds I added I quickly ran into two major problems: Firstly, checking for updates took a fairly significant amount of processor (I was using a 867Mhz Powerbook at the time) and also quite a lot of time.

Secondly, half of the feed reading process for me is opening a news item in a browser to see it on the original site, normal to check out whether there have been any comments made. NetNewsWire actually caters for this by having a built in browser – based on WebKit, the engine behind Safari – but the more I relied on RSS for my news consumption, the more I found I was using NetNewsWire’s simple, slightly crippled broswer instead of my much more feature rich everyday browser.

The solution, of course, was to use a web based feed reading application instead, so I jumped over to Bloglines – then king of the web-reader hill – and have never looked back. I’m now reading 690 feeds everyday, all without breaking a sweat thanks to bloglines.

So, I took a lot of interest in the release of the new beta version of Bloglines. To cut a long story short, while Bloglines used to be on top of the pile, ever since Google came along with their Reader application they’ve been loosing marketshare hand over fist; this new beta version is very important to the future of Bloglines.

Sadly, at the moment it just doesn’t cut it.

First up is the aesthetic. Now, Bloglines has never been particular attractive to look at – it seems to very much come from the Windows 95 school of design, with no sensitivity to typography, margins, attractiveness etc. I was, however, hoping that this was just a legacy of their startup past, and with Ask (their owners) money they would before able to afford some decent designers – sadly not. For gods sake – they’ve used brown.

That’s not to say their competitors are much better – Google Reader sticks with the normal Google un-aesthetic, and NewsGator is no better. It strikes me that it’s a little odd that applications that are primarily data presentation tools can put such a low priority on design.

Secondly, they’ve broken two of the main features that keep me with Bloglines – there are many other feed readers out there that get one or both of these wrong, but the old (current) Bloglines doesn’t; the new one does.

The main one is the unread system. Currently, when you click a feed in Bloglines it marks all the new items (since you last read that feed) read and displays them. This is perfect if – like me – you have a lot of feeds, as you can quickly skim through lots of feeds by clicking from one to the next and skimming through them. The new Bloglines beta – and Google Reader, on which it is obviously modelled – mark things read when you scroll past them, using Javascript trickiness. This, however, doesn’t work consistently, and you have to make sure you scroll past the entirety of an item to make it work properly. It seems very much like an over complication of an already perfected feature.

The other lost feature is the ability to read everything new at once, which is so amazingly useful I can’t understand why they’re removed it. My only guess is that they haven’t tested with people that don’t store feeds in folders, which I don’t – I keep everything unorganised, alphabetically (it’s quicker that way). Oddly, Google Reader gets this feature wrong as well – it presents its “Read All” organised by date, not by feed, which looses – or makes it hard to see, at least – the context, or originating site, of a feed item.

All the other features added in the Bloglines Beta are, quite frankly, utterly useless – I couldn’t care less about a dragable, re-orderable start page; just give me my feeds faster, please! Dito for Google Reader, which does all sorts of things – like the aforementioned unread system and the river-of-news ‘All new items’ view – that just get in the way of reading feeds.

Is it too much to ask to have a decent, simple, good looking web-based feed reader?