I tried. I really did. I wanted to give Google Reader a full week to see how well it works as a full-time feed aggregator.
I couldn't do it.
My morning check-in took 5 times longer than normal this morning. Google Reader seems like it would be nice for a small set of feeds, but it becomes unwieldy on my subscriptions. Endless scrolling, lots of clicking on folders, and waiting for items to be added to the bottom of the page, with no indication of how far you've come through the items in a folder (the scroll bar eventually becomes pegged at the bottom, even if there are 300 items left to read). And GR has no concept of a photo feed, so they're all displayed inline rather than in a grid, making it take an order of magnitude longer to go through my Flickr feeds. Frustrating.
GR has no real concept of ratings for feeds. I can star feed items, but not feeds. I can tag a feed with "5 stars" or the like, but GR doesn't know to treat that feed any differently (like bubble items from a "5 star" feed to the top of a list, etc…
So, I'm back to BlogBridge. Ahhhh… that's better. There's no place like home…
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
woah. I just grabbed the latest Weekly (now up to 4.5). It feels SO much faster than the 4.0.1 release build I was running.
I think that Google knew you would make this decision. You were one of the first feeds I added when I set up Google Reader (Three Amigos and EdTech Posse were my starting point for re-establishing my subscribed feeds). A little while ago your site stopped updating in Google Reader – almost like they wanted to keep me from reading your blog. Obviously, Google caches not only past web pages but also future ones, and tried to use this knowledge to keep me from reading about your experience. Early signs of evil?
You’re back on the list. I’ll let you know if anything “funny” happens. Let us speak of this no more while online.
Rob, that might have just been Echelon intercepting my recent lefty rantings…
Absolutely. BlogBridge rocks, and I have no idea why the vast majority of rss users prefer web-based readers.
My issue with Blogbridge has been that it’s hard to get a handle on what the current status of the application is. The download version is way, way behind the 4.5 version that dnorman alludes to, and you have to do a fair amount of work to figure that out.
It worries me that something I might come to rely on, like a newsreader, could have such an opaque development process.
OTOH, I rely on all kinds of stuff with opaque dev processes…
I’ve been using Shrook. I’m thinking seriously of switching to Blogbridge — it does some things that I’d REALLY LIKE to be able to do, really simple things like keyword-tagging, but can’t do in Shrook. And lately, Shrook has been struggling under the weight of my feeds (i, um, well, I aggregate a *lot* of feeds — in the low hundreds, and that list probably won’t get smaller). What I’ll probably do is start using BB for “work” blogging, and continue to use Shrook for more “personal” stuff. That will let me eval BB in a real-world environment.
Eric, I’m not sure why they haven’t updated the “stable” builds – the weekly is up to 5.1 now, while the stable languishes at 4.0.1 – but, if you can find the Java Web Start Weekly version (poke around the Developers area of the site) you’ll be kept up to date.
I couldn’t switch to a feed reader that doesn’t have star ratings and smart folders. iTunes for RSS feeds. Without those, I spend waaaay too much time navigating folders, rather than keeping up to date.
Google Reader is working fairly well for me, even with a tremendous number of feeds. I just click on the outside folder for each topic area, and use the spacebar to scroll through. The only issue I’m having with it is that it doesn’t (yet?) support secured RSS feeds. Bummer. Still looking for a web-based reader that will…
Bloglines supports http auth (and such feeds are exempted from their search)– though you have to put your username/password in the URL subscription string and be sure to set the feed to private so others can’t see it…