Goodbye, Bloglines. Hello, Google Reader.
Gina Trapani of Lifehacker writes about her move to Google Reader from Bloglines.
Her experience is similar to mine. For a few years I was an avid 9some might say “fanatic”) user of the Bloglines web service for reading syndicated feeds (RSS, ATOM, etc.).
Then two things happened. I completely burned out on reading feeds. I abandoned Bloglines, instead using a fairly shallow list of under 50 bookmarks.
One day on a whim I decided to try the current iteration of Google Reader. But a feed reader without feeds is no fun, so I used Bloglines to export my (huge) list of feeds as an OPLM file.
I pointed Google Reader to the OPML file from Bloglines, and was back in business.
It’s all good. Google Reader is pleasant to use. I read far fewer feeds i one day tan I used to, but it’s a handy way to skim a small sample of my list that now approaches 1,000 feeds.
In some sense, the pendulum is swinging away from the bookmark list, more toward Google Reader. But unlike the bad old days, there’s less obsession with trying to absorb the daily fire hose of information and commentary.
That’s like trying to count all the stars in the sky. You can’t do it, never mind that trying to do so will drive you crazy and make your eyes bug out.
I’d rather ride my motorcycle.
December 2nd, 2006 at 8:05 am
I found Trapani’s and your experiences interesting because they closely mirror my own. A couple of years ago, I dove in headfirst to Bloglines. I also pretty quickly overwhelmed myself with dozens of feeds, many of which were very high volume.
I also tried using the Bloglines Clippings feature as a kind of notebook for organizing both postings and other web resources that I wanted to make note of. However, the Clippings feature was buggy and it annoyed me. I went through months of email exchange with the Bloglines customer service people, and they kept assuring me that the engineers knew about the problems and were working on them. Finally, they stopped responding altogether to my queries.
About that time I took an extended break from reading feeds and such because of medical issues. Recently, I have been able to get back to following feeds with some regularity. I found that Bloglines still had the same bugs, so I cast about for alternatives. I read about Google Reader and gave it a quick try. It was so easy to set up and use that I never looked back. As it turns out, I wrote about my experience with Reader just a few days ago in my blog, too:
http://wileequixote.blogspot.com/2006/11/google-reader.html