Geek to Live: From Bloglines to Google Reader

by Gina Trapani

Every day I trawl through almost 250 web site feeds in order to write Lifehacker, and for the past 2 years I've used Bloglines to do so. No other feed reader (not even the one I helped build) had all the features I needed to track what I'd read and what I hadn't across computers and operating systems.

That is, until I gave Google Reader another whirl earlier this week. The just-rolled-out Reader upgrades turned the app into an even better product than the much older and more-established Bloglines, and so I've made the switch.

Similarities

Both Google Reader and Bloglines' user interface are comparable to an email client: two-paned view with folders of feeds that track unread and read items in the left pane. Click on a folder and all the items display in the right pane and you scroll through, reading the items (like email messages) as you go. (In fact, Google describes Reader as "your inbox for the web" and its interface will be very familiar to Gmail users.) Both are entirely web-based (no desktop reader install required) and both come with handy-dandy keyboard shortcuts to help you navigate. Now onto the differences.

Look and feel

I'm not exactly an easily-offended aesthete, but Bloglines' design made me wince from the get-go. It's just plain ugly. The color (which I took pains to change with the Bloglines teal-killer Greasemonkey script) , the font, the boxiness of it all - and after awhile a design you don't like starts to drag on you, becomes work to look at and use.

While Google Reader isn't the prettiest thing in the world (none of Google's apps are), it's definitely more polished, rounded and easier on the eyes than Bloglines. I also really love the human-friendly relative time stamps (ie, "6 hours ago" versus "11:06 AM.")

Further, Google Reader makes it easy for you to just read. For instance, when you first log into Bloglines, the right pane automatically loads site announcements and some static tips. Boring! Reader, on the other hand, displays a summary of some of the newer feed items from sites you've subscribed to by default. Immediately you want to dive right in to some interesting information, rather than start futzing around with your folder list (like in Bloglines.)

See an example of this in action on Reader's home page (click to enlarge):

Feed item limits

The other Bloglines behavior that's driven me nuts for months is a 200 item unread limit per feed. Once a feed reaches 200 unread items in it, Bloglines stops adding new ones to the feed listing. So if you haven't looked at a particularly prolific feed for awhile? The "newest" one you see when you do finally view it can be months old! I never understood that.

When a prolific feed approaches a high number of items, Reader marks its unread count as 100+ - a nice technique that says, "hey there's a lot of stuff here." (Once you're over 100 items, the exact number really doesn't matter any more.) And when you get into the 100+ range? Reader keeps adding new items at the top, as you would expect it to.

Performance

Speaking of lots of unread items, a feed that has tons of posts you haven't looked at in awhile can be a serious drag to load in Bloglines. On the other hand, Reader only displays 20 items at a time, dynamically loading the next 20 as you scroll down, never slowing down your reading session.

However, Google Reader is still in Labs (Google's "we don't want to call it beta"), so occasionally you may run into trouble. Like, during the writing of this article I got a Reader error while looking at the Lifehacker feed, a first after a week's worth of heavy daily usage:

Marking items as read

Perhaps the biggest difference between Google Reader and Bloglines that took me some time to get used to was the way each app marks a feed item as read. See, in Bloglines, if you click on a feed and it loads in the right panel, automatically all its items are marked as read - whether you've scrolled down to read them or not. Google Reader, on the other hand, only marks items that you've scrolled down to view as read. At first I thought it was a bug (why does that feed still have unread items? I looked at it already!), but it's actually a fantastic feature that ensures you haven't missed a thing.

Headline view

The other thing that Google Reader does well is offer a list view of items. Much like a Gmail list of email messages with the subject and a short preview of the body, you can easily scroll through a long list of just headlines and expand the ones you're interested in, especially nice for link feeds like from digg. (Click to enlarge).

Bloglines offers a title-only view with its big honkin' teal headlines, no body preview, a teensy plus sign on the left to expand the full item, which just isn't as user-friendly.

Last two defining features: Tags and email subscriptions

The last killer Google Reader feature is the ability to tag feed items - a HUGE help for power RSS readers. For example, it's easy for me to tag items things like "download," "to-post," or "macgyver" to post later on Lifehacker.

The one thing Bloglines has that Google Reader does not is its useful "Email subscriptions" feature. You can set up a disposable email address at Bloglines to receive mailing list items without clogging up your actual inbox (or risking opening up your primary email address to spam.) That's one Bloglines perk I will very much miss.

But overall, Google Reader takes the cake for this daily RSS consumer, in the very short time it's been in Google Labs. Like that kid in class who always wins every spelling bee, dontcha just wanna kick Google for being so damn good all the time?

What's your take on Reader and Bloglines? Is there a web-based reader out there that's even better? Let us know in the comments.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, is slowly moving her entire life onto Google's servers. Her semi-weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

[via] Lifehacker