Switched From Bloglines to Google Reader

A good RSS news aggregator is the most important tool for a blogger. I have been a loyal user of Bloglines for over a year and it is an amazing newsreader. I had tried the Google Reader a few months back, but it was not upto the mark. Recently Google Reader was upgraded and they have incorporated some powerful and useful functionality. Though the few changes bloglines made were very welcome, but Google reader has improved too much.

The initial motivation came from the Google Reader Review which highlighted the new improvements of the Google Reader and why it was superior to Bloglines. The final motivation for the switch was this informative article at Lifehacker by Gina. They compared in detail the features of bloglines and Google Reader and the choice became clearer.

Such useful articles have a tendency to get digged. Digg users always carry any discussion further by sharing their experience. And who better than the Google engineer Matt Cutts to analyze this live feedback. He takes into account all the issues mentioned in comments on these posts and gives his views. I am sure many new features will be released soon.

I simply exported feeds from Bloglines (I love OPML) and have been using Google Reader for the past few days and am finding it much easier to manage my feeds. The best part is to see posts from different feeds together, star them gmail style, and share them with ease. Another great feature is only the posts you actually view are marked read, and of course there are no duplicate new posts for minor updates. My Google reader wishlist includes adding favicon support, a longer left side panel and autorefresh for new content after a particular time interval.

Don’t take my word for it, give Google reader a try yourself…

Update: They made Google Reader more better. Set a start page, autorefresh is now on, you can make the sidebar disappear leaving you more reading space, and space bar can make things move…