So I’m about a week into using Bloglines as my primary (actually only) source for feed reading and I am totally into it. First, with a solid connection (like my current wifi connection at SFO), it’s incredibly quick and easy to use. I find that it’s in many ways quicker than some of the local readers I’ve tried. Of course there’s the read/unread status which carries regardless of what machine you use — amazingly good feature for people on more than one machine or platform.
The only negative as you might expect is that you are SOL when offline … that really does not happen all that often. On of the nicer bonus features when you do return online, is that your subs are already updated since there is no local downloading… it’s all been done on the server.
There are some nice things like the rendering you get with some local readers like my app of choice NetNewsWire on Mac, but since you can’t sync it to another platform it makes it tougher for me to use it when I am back on my home machine. I can easily maintain read/unread status through import / export of my OPML file, but I’ll be reading or at least seeing many items that I’ve read previously. Hopefully (I know I’ve mentioned this previously) someone will realize that a standard will greatly benefit many users.
Jonathan, great post; what would such a protocol that could sync client and server side aggregators look like? I imagine something like POP or IMAP but to link client and server side aggregators versus email clients.
Brad – Glad you liked it! I have no idea what the sync protocol would be like but I would imagine IMAP for RSS would do it. I use IMAP now and get email and read status across 2 computers and a palm.
I know that Newsgator does sync across a variety of devices and systems, but it’s only for newsgator users. The Bloglines system works since you are always reading from the server… It would be interesting to see client-side apps read the server info and be able to update not only read status, but also sunscriptions. On this past trip I’ve added a few more feeds to my list and I’ll have to eventually import a new OPML file into NetNewsWire in order to follow along there as well.