Bloglines 0, Google Reader 1

Posted by Peter F on February 27 2007 in Personal. There are 9 comments. Add yours!

I’m sorry Bloglines, but our love affair is over. It was great while it lasted, but after a couple of years, your one annoying trait finally drove me over the edge. I’m a Google Reader guy now, and I’m not looking back.

You see Bloglines, Google Reader does something so smart, and so obvious, that I couldn’t pass it up: it only marks an item as read once you actually read it. Talk about revolutionary!

See, I’ve got my feeds organized into folders. They’re grouped by type, so I can separate design blogs from marketing blogs and productivity blogs from cool stuff blogs (major incompatibility!). The thing is, in Bloglines, when I click on one of those folders to read the feeds, each and every feed in that folder gets marked as read. This is a problem.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve closed a tab or crashed my browser, only to find that a bunch of my precious feed items have been relegated to read status, without ever having had the opportunity to distract me from the tasks at hand. Sure, I can request to view all items from a given period, but that means that I have to wade through everything I read before. Pain in the scroll finger.

With Google Reader, I can start and stop my feed reading at will. I’m not committed to making it all the way through a folder at a single sitting. I can jump from folder to folder, and never worry about losing unread items. It’s just so easy.

Luckily, the switch from Bloglines to Reader is dead simple. In Bloglines, click on edit on the left pane, then look for export. Save your feeds info as an OPML file somewhere on your computer. Next, go to your Reader account, and click on settings, in the upper right corner. Look for Import/Export, follow the simple instructions, and you’re done. Reader even keeps your folder structure.

Given that it costs about $0.00 for either a Bloglines or Reader account, and given that it takes about 2 minutes to move your data, I highly recommend giving Reader a try.