Time for a new feed reader
I’ve been using Bloglines as my preferred feed reader since the start of the Thirty Day Challenge. I’ve been reading and subscribing to more and more blogs lately, and I think it’s time to find something better suited for my needs.
One thing I would like to see in a feed reader is very frequent updates - ideally checking feeds for updates once every minute or more. Another thing I would love to see is alerts (like most instant messaging programs) for certain feeds. I’d like to be notified by a little box at the bottom-right corner of the screen the instant certain feeds are updated so I am one of the first to know about it. With Bloglines, I have to have a tab dedicated to it and I have to switch to it to check for updates instead of it notifying me when it’s updated.
I haven’t done much exploring with other feed readers, so I am open to suggestions. I’ve heard good things about Google Reader but I am not sure it’s exactly what I’m looking for. We’ll see!
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for using Bloglines. I hope you end up sticking with us. Unless you write it yourself, you’ll probably not find a feedreader that updates as often as a minute or two because blog publishers would ban us from accessing their blogs for using up all that bandwidth all the time. As per the IM, we are hoping to publish an API soon, and maybe someone will take up the challenge of making such a useful tool. If I can find the time, I might just do that. :)
Thanks again,
Bjorn Tipling
Bloglines Engineer
Thanks for the comment, Bjorn. Good point about the bandwidth issue, I didn’t really think of that. It’d be nice if RSS was somewhat dynamic so you could request any entries after a certain timestamp. That way you could stay on top of updates without consuming so much bandwidth.
As for the alerts, I may tinker a bit with Adobe AIR to see what kind of GUI functions it has. A Bloglines API would be awesome, and you guys could probably make the whole dynamic RSS thing work like I described above.
Kevin,
I too started out using Bloglines as my primary feed reader. Although I liked it, I eventually headed over to Google Reader…only because, as a gmail user, I would already be logged into Google and it would be one less place for me to sign in when I surf the web on a new computer.
Google Reader seems to have more features…you can easily share your favorites (which you can “star”, which really just flags them for easier viewing) with your Google friends by simply pressing the “Share” button on the post. You can also tag your entries. The tags are listed in the left hand navigation screen. I would suggest checking it out if you haven’t yet. However, Google doesn’t have the two features you requested.
An API, as Bjorn mentioned, would be the easiest way for you to receive notifications similar to AIM, in the right hand corner. I’ve used SharpReader briefly. It has this notification feature you spoke of. However, I haven’t used it extensively, so I’m not sure if it’s interface is user friendly.
Hope I could help!