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Even though I am quite attached to Google’s wide range of services, I’ve always used Bloglines in the past as my feed aggregator, sometimes its nice to be supporting someone other than Google! Unfortunatly the ‘Bloglines Plumber’ popped his head up again this morning. Its a pity, I actually quite liked Bloglines as an aggregator, it was never ground-breaking in its approach but when it works its quick and easy to use.

The obvious successor is of course Google Reader, having a Google account means the sign-up is done and although I can only see myself using it three or four times a year, the offline capability added recently makes it more attractive. The feature I’m most thankful for is that items are not marked as read until you actually see them on screen. With Bloglines, if you click on a feed from the side panel, all the new items within that feed are marked as read whether you’ve had a chance to actually read them or not. Both this and the nice use of AJAX to allow you to read archives easily by just carrying scrolling are excellent. At the same time my major gripe is that Google, the god’s of search somehow forgot to include a search function as part of Reader which could be a matter of some annoyance.

I know Google Reader has been around for a while and the features I’ve mentioned are not exactly new, but its a novelty and a nice surprise for someone coming from Bloglines and being used to living without these features.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.