Solo Technology

Since NetVibes had added tabs to their homepage (a little over 3 weeks ago), I’ve been using it as my primary feed reader until today. In general, it has worked well but a couple minor issues finally convinced me to go back to Bloglines for my feed reading/tracking.

1. Too much clicking. No matter how nice the interface, navigating from feed to feed is mouse only. No short cuts. No “river of news” options
2. Feed glitches. Seems like some days feeds just never show up. Their little box stays at “updating” all day (and this is after I’ve confirmed the site is up and giving feeds manually with my browser). This may be a side-effect of netvibes popularity perhaps — capacity issues?
3. Probably related to the above, but I’m reasonably certain I’ve missed articles in feeds or received them later than expected

What does netvibes do well for feed reading? Great interface, multiple tabs to drag and drop the little rss objects around. It keeps articles you’ve read laying around which can be priceless when trying to find something you read a day or two ago but didn’t think to bookmark. It just plain looks “nice” and crisp.

But at the end of the day, Bloglines just gets the job done. It isn’t overly glitzy. Web 2.0 GUI “purists” probably gag when looking at it. But the ability to read feeds in river or by feed mode and all the keyboard shortcuts make it extremely functional. Oh yeah — the mobile client is priceless too for those rare moments when I’m on the Pocket PC and want to catch up. Now, if Netvibes does the river thing in the future…

Amusing note: I had cleared out my Bloglines feeds when trying Feedblendr. (I tried using that feed in Netvibes and it just was too awkward.)  Of course I had exported the Bloglines opml first. Turns out Bloglines doesn’t gracefully import opml files that it created in the first place! No feeds lost, thankfully, just had to do some reorganizing.

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