ReviewSaurus – Technology Rocks!

Bloglines, which is one of the most popular Online Feed Reader service was founded in 2003 by Mark Fletcher & is a property of IAC Search & Media which owns Ask.com as well. Bloglines is one of the tough competitors of Google Reader and has got some cool features but are they good enough, lets find out in the review :

PROS of BlogLines :

1. User Interface : Bloglines is a two pane feed reader. It has got the list of feeds on the left and on the right hand side, one can easily read all the updated items. It gives you the options of going through only new items and also gives the option of going through the earlier items as well.

2. Easy Navigation : Bloglines can be easily navigated with the help of Shortcuts. Thanks to the Ajax that it allows application developers to incorporate shortcuts like local desktop softwares and thus minimizing the use of mouse and increasing the productivity. It lets you keep an interesting article as new for future reference.

3. Great features : Bloglines has got much more features, as compared to other online feed reader services. It allows you to listen to the Podcasts, lets you blog from bloglines only. Lets you import and export the list of feeds. Create folders for similar feeds and thus the navigation becomes a bit easy too. Automatic updates and auto discovery of feeds is also there. Blog search also gives you the option of going through various interesting blog posts going around the blogoshere. One thing which I like the most about Bloglines is that it shows you the related blogs and thus can help you in finding cool blog posts and if you comment regularly on those blogs, then can help you in traffic as well.

4. Supports RSS & ATOM : Bloglines supports both the formats and all the versions of RSS & ATOM and thus brings the transparency. You don’t have to worry about which version you have to subscribe.

5. Displays that list of subscribers : It displays that how many users of bloglines have subscribed to a specific feed and thus gives you the idea about the popularity of a particular blog. As a blogger, you may be interested in knowing your own blogs popularity :)

6. Support for multiple languages : Bloglines is available in various languages and not just English and that gives it upper hand. There are many people on the web, who’d like to use a different language, apart from English.

CONS of Bloglines :

1. No Sorting : Bloglines fails to provide any sorting feature and there are some people who just love sorting the feeds according to the date or time. So, bloglines may disappoint you there.

2. Marks all the feeds as read automatically : This is the biggest negative, I can see in bloglines personally. As soon as we click on the folder, it marks all the feeds as read and one has to go through the list to keep the interesting ones as new. Lets take an example : You’ve got Technology folder and it has got 100 unread items and you click on the folder and after you are half way through, you realize that you’ve to go for an important meeting and you can’t get any late and that’s where Bloglines fail because it automatically marks all those rest 50 items as read and thus you just won’t be able to go through them at all.

Overall Rating & Views :

Bloglines is one of the best and feature rich online feed reader and just needs couple of improvements and will become the best of the lot. I can easily recommend, Bloglines to anyone at any given day.

Update : Sorry but how could I miss this one. Bloglines, lets you sort the feed according to the date and time.

Technorati : ATOM, Bloglines, Feed, ReviewSaurus

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