Bloglines: An Aggregator That Does Not Suck
I’ve been using bloglines for a few weeks now. I noticed quite a few folks using it at OSCON, and having tried several that suck, I checked it out and gave it a spin. Maybe it’s because after those four my expectations were pretty low, but I’m pretty happy with it. Clean, simple interface. Context menu extension for Firefox to make it trivial to subscribe to new blogs. And I really like that I can use it from any computer, any place, any time.
There are two things I would like to see implemented in some fashion, although if it’s realistic for one to be in bloglines. First, and possibly this is an issue with RSS, I’d like to optionally be able to follow the comments on certain posts. I wouldn’t expect to use it for popular sites, but rather for friends who have blogs, for a lot of what makes them interesting is the back & forth in the comments.
Second, I don’t think I really ever drank the RSS kool-aid. To me, a blog is just an interesting webpage. A webpage I generally like to read with the formating, design, and little bells & whistles of the page included. I’d love a browser blog that simply checked each blog for updates and opened those w/ new entries in a tab.
September 11th, 2004 at 12:33 pm
Well, it’s all about what the site/blog publishes. In principle, you could include comments in your RSS/RDF/Atom feed, although it would just appear in line; it wouldn’t integrate with the Bloglines comments (which are really more like references).
I have been feeling a bit of your point about the whole site experience lately as well. There are a number of blogs that I started reading in a large part because I liked their visual design. Now that I rarely see the actual site, I find some of them significantly less interesting.
September 13th, 2004 at 5:19 pm
bah! I have given up on aggregators. You don’t always get the whole post, you don’t get the comments, and you don’t get all the other possibly cool stuff on somebody’s web page. Formatting and design, of course But you also get to see newly added links and the occasional fun of being able to tell somebody about a bug on their site. I think if most people used aggregators people could just post blogs as RSS only and not bother with the web pages. And that wouldn’t be any fun at all.
September 15th, 2004 at 10:37 am
I actually find an aggregator useful - but only in a limited fashion, pretty much as an addendum to a browser. Yep, I have one (Firefox|Opera|whatever-I-feel-like-this-week) window with lots of tabs open, and AmphetaDesk in the first tab. Reload periodically, scan for unclicked links, load them in new background tabs, read at leisure. Well, it works for me :)
I guess this is not the right place for the AmphetaDesk HTML/XML encoding (or lack thereof) rant that has been bubbling for the past few months, so I’ll save that for later.
September 15th, 2004 at 11:23 pm
Kevin, do you know if anything inside ATOM makes it easier to syndicate comments? While you could shoe-horn it into RSS, it wouldn’t feel very natural.
April 29th, 2005 at 1:04 am
I was a Bloglines user until I came across Waggr - http://www.waggr.com
I think Waggr is much simpler to use, and has a much quicker interface. I highly recommend it.