Google Reader

Well, I've been dissatisfied with the instability of Bloglines for a while now, so the switch to Google Reader seemed like the perfect thing for me. I'm glad this lesson came along to give me the nudge to quit procrastinating.

Likes:

Items are not marked as read until you actually scroll down to view them. This is especially wonderful when my browser hangs up and I have to relaunch. With Bloglines, every time that happened, any items which had loaded, but which I had not yet actually looked at, were lost forever. With Google Reader, they're still there waiting for me. This alone guarantees that I will stick with Google Reader and leave Bloglines behind.

I love the hotkeys, especially j and k. It's nice to have an alternative to scrolling.

I like the presence of links to open articles in a new tab. (Just after the title--look for the two arrows in a little circle, resembling a fast forward button.) That saves me the trouble of right-clicking and selecting "open in new tab" every time I want to look at the comments for a post.

Dislikes:

Google Reader loads very slowly, even on DSL. It's not as bad as Google Maps, which is almost unusable on my home connection, but it's still a little troublesome at times.

In Bloglines, I could order the feeds within a folder, and I could get all new items from site A, then all new items from site B, etc. So I could have a gradual and carefully planned transition from serious to silly, or vice versa. In Google Reader, it's always newest item first, so clicking on one of my folders gives me a mess like D, B, A, C, C, A, A, B, D, A. That drives me nuts. I'm going to have to create a lot of new folders and reorganize everything so that blogs of dissimilar tone don't get all mixed together.

Overall, though, the pros outweigh the cons. A good feed reader has become an absolutely indispensable tool in my day-to-day life, both at work and at home, and there's a lot to like with Google Reader.