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Joe Shaw needs Google Reader

Joe Shaw, the jolly hacker from Novell and chief maintainer of Beagle, is having problems with Bloglines. Joe, I think you need Google Reader. It’s got everything that you want:

  • Web based – I read blogs from at least two different computers, so my subscriptions and read counts need to carry from one to another.
  • Two paned – I really, really like the two paned system Bloglines uses. You have feeds and groups of feeds on the left, you click one, and your unread ones load in the right. The pervasive three paned view is just retarded: way too many clicks and far too little information, and a one paned view (like Planet) is just too much information due to the number of blogs I subscribe to.
  • Ability to mark items as unread – Bloglines has this nice “Keep new” checkbox in each item that allows me to come back to an article later. Particularly nice for all those Boing Boing NSFW items.

Google Reader is web-based, two-paned, and can mark items as Unread. Besides, Bloglines’ primitive web interface doesn’t even compare with Google Reader’s AJAX-ed smoothness. It handles Atom, RSS, and Feedburner-style syndications. Can import/export from/to OPML, so migrating from Bloglines is going to be a non-issue.

I’ve tried out Bloglines, Google Reader and Thunderbird’s built-in RSS reader, but Google Reader really beats the lot.