I’ve used Bloglines for a few months now as my RSS/Atom/XML reader and it’s a wonderful tool to organize information from websites. I’ve got few dozen feeds broken up into a half a dozen or so categories that I check daily. This includes not only current news, but allows me to track recently posted torrents, comments added to interesting blog posts, and even track package delivery. I love Google, and when Google first released their ‘Reader’ service a few months back, I gave it a quick look, but found it to be vastly inferior to Bloglines. Well, Google recently updated their Google Reader service, and it should be no surprise that it looks a lot like Bloglines.

Google Reader now has a very similar look to it’s Gmail service, which many speculate could merge into one interface. Google adds some nice features that Bloglines doesn’t have, such as tags instead of folders, allowing one feed to appear in multiple categories, viewing feeds as compact lists, and viewing posts from all feeds in one list. These are options I would like to see in Bloglines. I’ve tried switching to Google Reader twice now. It’s easy to do, you can export your feeds from Bloglines and import them into Google Reader, and vice-versa. Both times, I’ve switched back to Bloglines for one simple reason. Speed.

When I’m using Bloglines, I don’t notice load time. That’s not to say that it doesn’t exist, but it happens in a way that I’m not aware of it, it doesn’t slow me down. With Google Reader, I am constantly waiting for the interface to update with more information. The first example is the one you’ll see the first time you load the page after you’ve setup a feed. You’ll get a little ‘loading’ icon in the middle of the screen. While it’s loading, the browser interface is frozen (at least with IE6 it is), meaning if you set Google Reader as your default page, and you open a new browser window, you have to wait for it to get it’s feed information before you can begin typing in the address bar. The second, and for me the more frustrating, is scrolling threw posts. While scrolling, Google Reader loads 20 posts at a time. Once it loads 20, and you begin scrolling through them, it waits until you get to the end of the list before it begins loading the next 20, so you must sit and wait for it to update. Couldn’t it load the next 20 while I’m scrolling through the previous 20? Apparently not since the process of ‘loading’ freezes the interface, which would prevent scrolling. Bloglines does not suffer from this, and if you watch your status bar you can see it loading posts as you browse the feed.

I really want to use Google Reader, but for now, it’s back to Bloglines. Hopefully Google will get the ‘lead out’, and speed up their new interface. After that, combining it with Gmail would be a logical move. Oh, one more thing, allow posts to be viewed from oldest first to newest last. Neither tool allows this, yet it seems as though it should be the default. When I’m browsing news, I want to see it develop as I scroll through posts, not get the latest info, and then watch as the steps leading up to it fade away…