RSS Readers & Bloglines.com Review

So, in the past I was quick to judge all the RSS aggregators out there, in search of that one perfect web-based aggregator. Then, I was quick to write off bloglines.com, one of the more prominent web-based aggregators out.

Well, after running off to attempt to write my own, I got about half finished and realized that it would be a full time job if I wanted to continue. And, with nGallery already being my main focus, I just didn't have the time and resources to commit to it.

Then, Newsgator came out with their online services. Those are great, but I'm just really not willing to pay for a reader or a monthly subscription service. To me, the ideal solution is the web-based RSS aggregators and readers.

Personally, I see the model becoming like the hotmail/my MSN architecture: web-based, stand alone reader with portal integration off to the side. Yahoo just announced their ability to include RSS feeds into their My Yahoo portal (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001474.html).

So, I figured I really deserved to give bloglines a second chance. I went back and registered, imported my OPML feed and set a goal of giving it a chance and forcing myself to use it for 2 weeks.

And, after one week, I can honestly say, I'm really very happy.

Some of the great features I love:

• Item Notifier: They have a web-based, and client based notifier. In the case of the client notifier, it's a simple little system tray app that sits there and pops up a balloon tip letting you know when you have new items to read, and how many. Clicking on it brings up your browser and heads you off to bloglines.com to read them. They have a client version available for Windows and Mac OS X.

• Recommendations: This is a nifty little one-click search that will give you a list of all other feeds in their database that you may be interested in, based on feeds you already subscribe to. Very very cool.

• E-mail Subscriptions: What a sweet feature. Here, you can create a @bloglines.com e-mail address of your very own. And, any e-mail sent to this address magically appears within your reader. This is particularly useful for newsletters or any type of read-only e-mail that you wish to centralize in one reader, and keep the clutter out of your own e-mail client.

• Blogrolls: This feature allows you to make your blogroll public. For example, you can see mine at http://www.bloglines.com/public/jalexander. You also have the power to mark what feeds and folders are public/private and shouldn't be shown through your roller. Combined with this, they allow you to use a javascript call to display your blogroll externally, and never have to maintain it again. I've done it here on my blog (see the huge list on the left).

• It's absolutely free. I'm a big proponent of free (see nGallery) software.

So far, I've had very few con's to this service. My only nit-pick would be the UI. It's very simple (and some people like that), but I would love to be able to customize the UI via CSS overloads, and/or some way of supporting skinning.

But, overall, I would definitely recommend this service. Give it a try. I think you'll be really impressed.