The new Bloglines rocks
Bloglines received a major facelift this morning, turning the service from tolerable to actually enjoyable. Today it stands as the nicest web-based aggregator out there, and gives desktop readers a run for their money.
The big selling point of Bloglines used to be that it worked in any decent browser, so that you could log on from anywhere and get your RSS fix, knowing that the next time you logged on your list of feeds would be there and articles already read would be properly marked. Killer feature for anybody reading their feeds from different computers during the day. But some of the desktop browsers, like RSS Bandit, are building in syncing features, so this advantage will soon be negated.
To combat this, Bloglines uses network edge effects--it knows which feeds all its members are reading, and can use this information to help you find other feeds you might find interesting, and allows you to search its entire database of feeds. So it's like a mini-google for blogs. Once somebody subscribes to a feed it goes into the database and becomes visible to the Bloglines universe. And then the fun begins--Bloglines shows the number of subscribers for each feed, and also updates articles with references to posts. So if you post an article, and somebody else whose site is also in Bloglines links to that post, the reference shows up. Pretty yummy.
Yes, Technorati provides the same sort of features and more, but not integrated right into the feed reader so that it becomes a part of the casual browsing experience.
Features like emailing posts, a virtual clipboard for interesting posts, and an easy-as-pie blogrolling feature are gravy. Tasty gravy.
Naturally, being a browser application, Bloglines suffers from a less rich GUI than a desktop application can provide, but today's upgrade goes a long way to address the inherent clunkiness of web applications, and introduces the one feature at least I've been missing for the few months I've been using the service: You can now sort your feeds according to how many unread articles they have. This means that any feeds with unread articles float to the top so that you don't have to scroll through the entire feed list to see if there's been updates. This provides a surprising speed boost when plowing through feeds, at least for me. (My list is currently at 304 feeds.)
Some things that could stand to be improved include skinning--I would love to be able to provide my own CSS for how the page should look--and a speed boost. Bloglines is by no means slow, but since browsing feeds always means a round-trip to the server, things sometimes don't snap. In a desktop aggregator, moving around in feeds is darn near instantaneous, since everything's already been downloaded. That's probably just one of those the Lord giveth to web applications, and the Lord taketh from web applications things, though.
Also, the tabs above the articles when browsing seem to suggest that you can get back to the article you're reading after viewing some other info in the tab, but it doesn't, which is a bit disconcerting at first and should probably be changed.
If you're one of those unfortunates still getting your news fix by manually going to sites, Bloglines provides an excellent and free way of dipping your toes in the refreshing waters of RSS.
One of the great mysteries of Bloglines is how they're planning to make money off it. There are no ads, and the whole things is completely free. I can't see there being enough money in the data they've aggregated to make a profit, but perhaps I'm just missing something obvious.
Listening To: "New Dawn Coming / Blue Guitar" by Cowboy Junkies 
