Primordial Ooze

I’ll start off this comparison with a disclaimer. The review I present here is not as comprehensive as you’d get if you were reading a real publication. Below is an account of the review I did for myself as I debated on which tool I wanted to use moving forward. Perhaps the insight will be useful to you, perhaps not. There you have it.

I have been a loyal user of Bloglines for a long, long time. I was sold on the concept of a server-based aggregator the moment I was aware that the tools were out there. No tool could ever really compare to Bloglines. I always admired it’s simplicity and usefulness. Now there is another compelling choice out there and I’m once again tempted to switch.

As I used Bloglines, I saw that the feature set started to become rather stale after a while. So, I started to play with some of the other tools out there. To my dismay, tools like Rojo, Netvibes, Google Reader never seemed impressive enough to switch. Google reader, for instance, was terribly slow in it’s initial version. So, I was stuck with Bloglines. It worked, so I dismissed the lack of development and simply enjoyed the tool that still worked for me.

Then a few things happened. First, Bloglines started to improve. New features started popping up all of a sudden and my aggregated life started getting better. Then, a new world was open to me when Bloglines introduced their mobile version. My PDA is Internet-enabled and I now had the ability to read feeds during my 50–minute commute.

Now, Google Reader is back and with a vengeance. The new version is a completely new experience and boats dozens of features and speed improvements to boot. The dark side pulls at me. My situation is worsened when I find that Google Reader has a feature that I have been dying for Bloglines to add: mark individual items as read as you read them. There is AJAX magic going on here, but it works.

Google Reader has everything I need, yay! I can now use Google for everything!

Wait! Stop! Hold on a minute? What about their mobile version?

In a word, is sucks some serious ass! It’s simply unusable. The m ain reason is because the reader doesn’t show much from the entry. So, I’m constantly clicking on each entry, reading it, going back to the unread list, picking a new entry to look at, etc.

All of this switching is pretty slow on a mobile device, even if I have a 300Kbps connection (latency is not good). Your experience kind of looks like this:

Now, compare that to what you get in the Bloglines mobile reader. The full text in the feed is displayed. On my PDA, images usually get shrinked 50%, so the display doesn’t quote look this good:

Reading posts via Bloglines mobile is simply much more efficient. If a feed is large and has lots of entries and images, I can begin reading the first few entries while the rest of the entries load (though sometimes my scrollbar freezes, blast!)

Lastly, Bloglines skweezes all of the links you see in the feeds. So, anything I visit while surfing on the mobile device is nicely formatted for my phone.

I’m wondering how long Bloglines can survive, particularly if Google comes out with yet another revision that simply addresses all of my needs. That scenario is likely and I’ll be watching.

For now, I remain a Bloglines user and the mobile version is to be thanked for this.