Pageflakes and the new RSS Reader

I haven’t mentioned these folks for several months now, but that doesn’t mean they’ve been standing still. It actually means they fell off my personal radar — but they’re back on now! Pageflakes announced the new RSS Reader quite recently and it is pretty sweet. As I’ve recently switched back to Netvibes from BlogLines (yet again), I had to convince myself to give this new reader a try… and I’m reasonably certain it was worth the effort.

The good news is the Netvibes OPML export was easily imported by Pageflakes. I was a little nervous about having to get all my feeds over there but that part went quick. Where I spent all the time was just in organizing all my feeds within the 3 tabs I’d allocated. Thankfully, dragging and dropping from tab to tab works well.

As near as I can tell, you get to the RSS Reader only by clicking on a post from any of your RSS “flakes.” Once there, however, you have an “outlook style” view on all feeds and their associated posts (see the RSS Reader announcement for more details and pictures). This works quite well and is very intuitive. There are a bunch of sorting options and options related to marking things read/unread — both within an individual site’s feed or across all feeds. A much appreciated feature after importing a whole big pile of feeds.

What could be better? I’d love to see some keyboard navigation! Secondly, I wonder if it would make sense to step back and ponder the user experience between having 3 tabs full of rss feeds and the all-encompassing feed reader. I mean, why do I need all those individual feeds cluttering up the joint if I’m just going to jump straight into the new reader?

What might be a bug? I have a bunch of feeds listed as “Channel not loaded yet.” After some clicking around, they appear to be feeds from my bookmarked feed list, but not feeds that I’m displaying on any tabs. Not sure if that’s expected behavior or not (I’d personally lean towards “not”).

[update] Another nit to pick that I’ve noticed since writing this post:  we seem to periodically lose track of what’s been marked read and what hasn’t.  For instance, after I finished importing all my feeds, I popped into the reader and marked all feeds read.  Yet 30 minutes later, some were showing as if they were completely unread.  I shrugged it off as possibly related to all of my dragging and dropping of feeds to tabs.  However, since then it has done it again.  If that’s something that happens frequently, then my opinion may flip 180 degrees pretty quickly.
All in all, a great enhancement that is pretty close to being very appealing to the RSS junkies with just some minor tweaks. I wonder what’s next on the plate?

Possibly Related posts:

1. Pageflakes and WTF 2.0
2. A Useful Google Reader Released
3. Acrobat Reader – With RSS?!?
4. Pageflakes – another ‘web’ desktop? But wait!
5. Netvibes Reader Changes