The online RSS feed reading wars are on! Both of these tools offer feed management and reading from a browser, which allows you to have everything in sync wherever you read from. That's a feature I need, but the disadvantage is that you do have to be online to do your reading. Recently many people seem to be jumping ship from Bloglines to Google Reader. I've been watching this happen, but felt so comfy with Bloglines that there was no sense in looking at alternatives. Until last week, that is.
You see, I found that some of my feeds were delayed before being updated in Bloglines. This seemed unacceptible if there was a good alternative out there, so I decided to do a quick, but unscientific, head to head comparison of the two.
I was interested in three factors:
- Ease of use
- Timeliness of feed updates
- Usefullness on mobile devices (specifically my PalmOS Treo 700p)
Here are the results...
EASE OF USE
Category Winner: Bloglines (by a large margin)
For me, there was no comparison. The slightly old-fashioned interface of Bloglines is comfortable for me, and it's very natural and efficient. I don't have to wonder what is going to be marked as read, and it pretty much does what I want.
Both readers were slightly less responsive when loading lots of feeds, but neither was too annoying.
One problem I had with Google Reader was that it mixed all the feeds toghether in the content pane (the left pane is sort of like a feed navigation tree in both tools), so instead of reading things that fit together, I had a mish mash of items which was harder to get through quickly. Another problem I had with Google Reader was that it kept adding more items as I scrolled down, so I was never sure if I was done. And if I was done, I wasn't sure if the screen scrolling jumps has caused me to miss a page or not.
Google Reader also has a funny way of choosing what to mark read. It could be an advantage for some users to manually mark things read, but for me it was annoying. There is an option to adjust that, but for me the whole thing was just confusing and I was unsure exactly what it was going to do. With Bloglines, if I did display some feeds and not read them, I had the other problem - there was no button to mark everything unread so I could come back to it later. There is a facility to "Keep unread", but that's sort of a permanent thing, so when you come back to display it again, you would have to specifically unmark the feeds. The best option seems to be just to requery the feeds you didn't read for a specific length of time (e.g. last hour or last 24 hrs or whatever). That works pretty well for me.
Both readers have a nice way to mark posts to keep them for later. In Google Reader you tag them, and in Bloglines you clip them. Each has simple access when you want to look at the marked items.
TIMELINESS OF FEED UPDATES
Category Winner: Google (by a small margin)
This is the issue that caused me to consider dumping Bloglines in the first place after using it happily for so long. I felt my feeds were coming in delayed. So I used both readers side by side and my little experiment seems to show that both readers experience some delays with the feeds being updated. Google seemed better in the feeds I paid attention to, but there really wasn't much difference. I have about 275 feeds, so maybe this only applies to high feed volume accounts. I'm not sure.
I do still worry that on occassion Bloglines has update issues, but I have no evidence or facts. It's just a feeling I get after using it.
USEFULNESS ON MOBILE DEVICES
Category Winner: Bloglines
This was quite a surprise to me. I expected the Google reader to be outstanding on mobile devices. But on my Treo, at least, I found the same user interface confusion extending to the mobile version, and it took me a lot longer to read the Google feeds with all the small screen requerying from the server. Bloglines plops a lot of stuff there and it's simple to look at a story, then hit the back arrow to get back to the list of posts. It's very natural.
CONCLUSION
Overall Winner: Bloglines
It's no contest for me. I'm sure there are reasons to like Google Reader better, but I haven't found them. If speed up updates is critical, then maybe it's worth it, but the interface is slower and more confusing to me. Maybe new Google Reader users just haven't tried Bloglines? Or maybe I'm just not using Google Reader properly. I don't know.
For the look of the interface, though, I think I saw a story in one of the feed readers about using a style sheet in IE or Firefox (with an extra add-in to enable it). Apparently, that gives it a nice new shiny look. Also, I should point out that Google Reader is probably still in beta. By the time Google is done with it, my impressions may be completely different. Or even after I watch a pro using it, I might learn a thing or two that turns me on to it.
But for now, Bloglines is my solution, and I'm happy with it. No switch to Google Reader for me. Tell us about your own experiences with online RSS feed readers.
Update: I should mention one more item that is important to mobile users. Bloglines is tightly integrated with Skweezer, which optimizes sites for mobile devices. Should you prefer to not use Skweezer, it can be turned off in the options. In my opinion, this is a big plus for mobile use, and serves a wide range of devices well.