Bye, bye, Bloglines
Finally, after like 3 or so years, I am closing the doors on Bloglines. Bloglines has been my RSS Aggregator of choice since I started using RSS aggregators.
Like a lot of people, I started out with some of the offline ones like RSS Bandit and NewsGator. However, I found that I wasn’t always using my laptop (as a single store for offline items) nor was I always reading entries at work or at home. It became clear very quickly that an online aggregator like Bloglines was the solution for me.
I wrote about Bloglines here at Primordial Ooze many times. I wrote an early Bloglines RSS extractor in Python which helped me manage my iPodder subscriptions back in the very early days of Podcasting.
When I got a mobile device with broadband Internet access, I discovered Bloglines’ mobile version which was simple and perfect for my commute.
Then, the trouble began. Bloglines development was progressing slower than molasses. At some point during all of this, Google Reader came out. I could have moved over at that point but the Google mobile reader simply wasn’t ready.
Still, Google kept innovating and new features were being added on a regular basis. Contrast this to the sickly pace I was experiencing over at Bloglinesland. Only in the past 12 months has Bloglines slowly added features:
- A better mass-subscription editing mode
- More AJAXy goodness so I don’t have to refresh so much
- Um…
That’s not a very long list.
Then, all of a sudden, Google Reader announced that they will support Google’s new Google Gears offline plugin to Firefox.
I was interested so I export my subscriptions from Bloglines, imported them into Reader, checked out the mobile version and was simply amazed at the improvements made since I last looked.
- Far more AJAX than Bloglines could ever have, resulting in a cleaner less web-like experience
- Offline capabilities (though not too important to me)
- Excellent tagging and searching of feeds
- Reading trend analysis to help be continually cull and grow my subscription list to suit my changing reading habits
- The “Next” bookmarklet is fantastic for all of those feeds with annoying partial entries. It brings up the next unread item, except the actual page referenced i n the RSS and not the content of the RSS! This will change the way I read RSS.
- And a lot more.
If you are a Bloglines user, you should consider Google Reader. IMHO, it’s better, more innovative, tons more features, and maintained with a lot more dedication which will only serve to increase its lead.
R.I.P. Bloglines