I’m a long-time user of Bloglines, a RSS feed reader. I always have a browser tab open, reading feeds throughout the day. But, after reading Gina Trapani’s article at Lifehacker, where she compares Bloglines to Google Reader, I’ve finally decided to give Google Reader a try.
Google Reader is a web-based feed aggregator/reader, just like Bloglines, but it’s user interface is done in the Gmail style. It has its own quirks and the earlier version of it didn’t really make me want to switch, but my biggest complaint with Bloglines is that when you select a feed to read, it marks all the new entries as read–this can be really annoying with high-volume feeds with lots of new articles.
Moving my feeds over was easy: just export the OPML from Bloglines and import it into Google Reader. Google Reader imported my feeds pretty nicely, and the whole tag/label scheme in in Google Reader is pretty nice. Except: there’s no way to rename a tag?! If you can, I sure can’t figure out how.
So, I’m going to give Google Reader a try, using it to read all my feeds for a week or two, to see if I really want to switch permanently.
Tags: Bloglines, Google Reader, RSS, feeds
Programmer, husband, father, singer, guitarist, tinkerer, reverse engineer, strange, and living in New Jersey. 
I would like to use google reader because it is so easy… but I use NetNewsWire, which syncs up with newsgator. So I use that when I’m online reading. But if I could get google reader to sync up with NNW, I would.
Indeed, a desktop reader client that could sync to Google Reader (or Bloglines) would be fantastic.
I’ve previously implemented an IMAP interface in front of the Bloglines Sync API, but never completed it. Maybe I’ll take a stab at updating it to ponit at Google Reader …
I did the switch about 3 months ago, for much the same reason. I’m very much pleased with the result.
Seems like you should be able to add a tag, then remove the old one to do the renaming… but I haven’t tried it.
Jeff: I did think about the “add new tag, remove old tag” to “rename” tags, thanks.
Another annoyance: I’d like to “hide” a few feeds (or a whole folder) from the “All items” view (which I’m using to read all new items). I guess I’ll figure out a way to organize my feeds such that I can accomplish this, but in my first 24 hours of using Google Reader, this is somewhat annoying.
Up until last week aswell, I was a die-hard desktop client RSS reader… Then I did the deal with the devil and am loving Google Reader.
The desktop ones work ‘well’ but there is always something extremely annoying about each one which was driving me crazy. Snarfer was great, however, I think I’m sold on the Google Reader for now.
(I’m also finding that I can keep my feeds from getting away on me easier with Google than with the desktop one.. not sure why, but I’m keeping my eye on it…) ;)