Ive been using Bloglines ever since RSS became the “next big thing”. And frankly Bloglines does the job extremely well. But the king has entered the building. And for me, anything the (web)world does, Google can do better. Or can it?

So what follows are the postives and negatives of Bloglines and GoogleReader.

Bloglines +

• Not having to log in. I just click on my Bloglines bookmark and Im there. 1 click
• Easy to read. All my feeds are listed in the left resizable frame, easy to read and scroll.
• The “Sub with Bloglines” bookmark link. Ingenius. Browsing any page with a RSS feed that I want to subsribe to, I click on the bookmark link and choose which feed I want to subscribe to, and voila! Subscribed.
• Being able to set my feeds as public.

Bloglines -

• If I by mistake click a different feed before reading the current one, I then have to use the “display items within the last xx hours/weeks” etc. To me, this is an irratation.
• The editing/deleting/sorting of feeds is alittle cumbersome. check checkboxes, choose action. Submit. Repeat until I’m satisfied. And then after all that, I STILL have to click [finished]. What the hell.
• The above also applies to sorting your feeds into folders. Time consuming and very irratating.

But for all the negatives, I still really like Bloglines. Ive never had the need to switch to a desktop RSS reader, or
for that matter shop around for a better alternative. Bloglines does its job, and I didnt need to know any better. Until a relatively small company in Mountain View, California, decided to release a beta RSS reader called GoogleReader.

GoogleReader +

• All the AJAXy goodness that you come to expect from Google apps of late. GoogleReader is no different. From listing your feeds and labels to reading through archives and archives of your feeds using up and down buttons.
• The “keep unread” checkbox. Simple but oh so effective. Update - bloglines has implemented it too!
• Starred items. I dont use this feature much, but acts as a secondary bookmark tool.
• gmail this and BlogThis! These 2 actions can be used on every post. Being able to email the post to my friends instead of cut & pasting into email editor is very cool. Or if you use blogger.com, you can blog about the post.

GoogleReader -

• Logging in. Why cant you do what Bloglines does, and not make me login everytime.
• Adding feeds to GoogleReader is a real pain. I have to either search for a feed or find the RSS feed on a website, copy the feed URL and paste it into GoogleReader. You can import an OPML file, but that doesnt solve my problem.
• The user interface. I sometimes find myself lost and not knowing how to get to where I want to be. Its probably owing to the fact I’m used to the Bloglines way of displaying the feeds in the left frame, but still.

So what does all this teach us?
Bloglines is definitely one-up in my books because of the “Sub with Bloglines” bookmark, and a few other features lacking in GoogleReader. But as we all know Google, updates are on the way, I’m sure of it. On a sidenote, GoogleReader has keyboard shortcuts for its interface, and not even a week has gone by since the launch of GoogleReader and Bloglines has implemented “hotkeys”. Wonder where Bloglines got that idea from?

So in conclusion, Bloglines still rules. Ill definitely keep monitoring GoogleReader’s progress and who knows, if Bloglines don’t up their game, I might have to do the nasty and switch. But until then, Bloglines gets my vote.