I have no idea if I like it or not yet. It’s in the flavor of Gmail with tons of JavaScript. All I do know is that loading 181 feeds from bloglines in to Reader seems to be taking forever. Updates to come as I continue to play with it.
All the Digg.com kids are having fun bashing it. Slashdot too. Lot of people saying they like Bloglines better. In general bloglines is okay but but it’s still painful to use.
Update: In general the feed reader has an interesting focus and one that Keri might agree with. Gmail has shown how google can really get to the heart of what people are trying to do with technology and I think they realty hit the head with their feed reader. The way I use bloglines is almost like bookmarks. If I find an interesting web site I subscribe and that’s how I have 181 feeds in bloglines.
When the feed updates bloglines bolds the feed and tells me how many posts. There are a lot of feeds I am subscribe to that i don’t check daily like Slashdot, Robert Scoble and Metafilter. I have my list of favorite sites and I start checking them until i run out of time. When I come back later I start back at the top of the list of favorite and work my way down again. This way some of the blogs on the bottom of my list rarely to never get checked. Some blogs I don’t really ready everything and like to wait till they have a bunch of post and then quickly look at the headlines to see if anything jumps out. I believe this way lets me see what I’m really interested in as well as get a general knowledge of what some of the people I don’t have time for are talking about.
Google reader really focuses on the individual post. When a blog updates the post is put at the top of your queue and that’s it. This system is a very Post driven reader as opposed to bloglines which is Subscription driven. The current way i read blog is extremely Subscription driven though I can see how a system based on new posts is more focused on reading new content now and not saving it for later. Right now I like saving it for later and then skimming it and stopping if I’m really interested. It does allow for free tagging though I’m not entirely sure how you navigate the tags.
In general I say I like it but there is something about it that I find off putting and I can’t put my finger on it.
Update: TechCrush has a pretty fair review.