Last winter I was whining about Bloglines (and aggregators in general). The need to keep up with more and more good writing has overcome my initial dislike of the stripped-down, homogenized reading experience offered by aggregators (although there are still some sites I prefer to visit "in person"), so I've spent some time recently comparing Bloglines with Rojo and Google Reader. The bottom line? Bloglines is still my favorite, but they're going to have to keep improving to stay on top. A few comments on each:
Bloglines
- Reading: The best feed-reading experience, hands down. Their folder view gives me the best perspective on who's posted recently, and allows me to drop into an individual feed while keeping an eye on the overall list. Navigation is easy and intuitive. Outstanding mobile access, which is more and more important to me. The times I'm away from my laptop are the times when an aggregator is most useful to me.
- Sharing: Very good subscription list sharing options. Easy to create, manage and customize your blogroll, and users can view your public subscriptions right in their browser or directly import your OMPL file. And AFAIK it's a unique feature to be able to distinguish between public and private subscriptions, something that will probably become more important.
- Management: However, they have the worst feed-management experience. Lots of clicks and refreshes involved every step of the way, clunky menus and commands--it's quite annoying and feels very old-fashioned.
Rojo
- Reading: So-so reading experience. It gives me a useful view of my subscription list but to scroll down the list on the left, I need to mouse all the way over to the right--there's no separate scroll bar for the list itself--a UI quibble, but an irritation nontheless. Rojo's also slooooooow--way too slow to enable me to zip through my subscription list, and that's a deal breaker. And terrible mobile access--not even comprehensible on my Treo.
- Sharing: Rather than enable list-sharing via links to your overall list or your OPML file, Rojo has you enter individual contacts with whom you can opt to share specific posts. OTOH, this is a cool social networking feature, very similar to OutFoxed, and it bears a close relationship to my work with AttentionTrust (knowing which specific stories your contacts are paying attention to is much more efficient than knowing which feeds they're subscribed to). But OTOH, I haven't bothered to enter any contacts--the network effect hasn't kicked in yet.
- Management: Better than Bloglines, with some significant innovations. One is the ability to tag posts and feeds and sort by tag--yours and other peoples'--and this aggregator+seach+social network capability feels like it has great potential, but it hasn't been compelling enough yet to get to to actually tag anything.
Google Reader
- Reading: It has a very slick, fast AJAX-y interface--no surprise there--but the actual user design is horrible. The apparent inability to look at my overall list and see how many recent posts are in a certain feed is a fatal flaw. I don't just want a list of posts spewed out by date (too random) or sorted by "relevance." I want to be able to zoom out and look at a list of feeds, decided where to focus my attention, zoom into a specific feed and check out the recent posts, zoom back out and decide where to go next. Google Reader makes this very difficult.
- Sharing: No real options here at all. A big disappointment.
- Management: Equivalent to Rojo. You can tag feeds (although we all know Google calls tags "labels"), but I don't think you can tag posts--although you can "star" posts, a la Gmail.
So long, Google Reader--we won't meet again. Stick around, Rojo--you have some real potential. But at least for now, it's back to Bloglines.
(On a related note, I've enjoyed playing around with OPML Manager. It's pretty bare bones, but it offers the ability to centralize your subscription management and separate that function from the other tasks your aggregator performs. As someone who hates Bloglines' management capabilities but likes it in other ways, this could be very useful for me.)
bloglines rojo google+reader aggregators rss feeds opml opml+manager
