Bloglines no more- Enter Google Reader

I have used Bloglines for over a year now, but alas, I have finally laid my use of their service to rest. While contacting customer service and support did yield a response, suggestions I noticed were often not taken very kindly. Surprising the amount of places that ask for suggestions but don’t really want them. It doesn’t matter where the market is going anyways, right?

With that, Bloglines is a great service if you’re not a heavy RSS reader. I found it nice for managing a small number of feeds, but overall Google Reader is just plain better.

Why is Google Reader better than Bloglines?

For a number of reasons. For one, once you’ve read a blog post on GR (Google Reader) it doesn’t just go away. It becomes marked as read. This means I can come back to look through a number of recent posts at a later time. BL (Bloglines) does not have this functionality. Once I read a post on BL, that post is read and gone from my list entirely. If i want to find it again, I have to go to that blog and find the post. This especially annoying if I’m not exactly sure which blogger it was. With GR, it’s not as much a pain as I can easily scan all the recent posts.

Secondly, BL had no ‘favorite post’ functionality. This made it frustrating when you came across a post you wanted to reference later on or particularly enjoyed. The only option you had was to add it to a social bookmarking site, and not in any convenient manner might I add. GR on the other hand has that nice handy little star you can click to favorite a post. Still, automatically adding an “Add to Ma.gnolia” or del.icio.us wouldn’t hurt. Reduce friction and we’ll love you more, I promise.

Thirdly, although not quite thirdly so much as realizing the first two were apparently enough to get me to switch, BL doesn’t handle custom categories (folders) as well as GR does.

One thing I was surprised to see Google Reader lack was the ability for me to search the content of all of the blog posts I’ve read through with Google Reader. It seems to me that with Google being in search and all, this would be a natural feature. Still, I sit wrong and sadly unable to search.