InsideGoogle

Bloglines Launches All New, All Better Version

After a long wait, and much worry by fans that Bloglines was a dead project, tonight they’ve launched a new version that brings some great new features under the same rock-solid infrastructure and familiar feel.

The new version is live right now at beta.bloglines.com. If you’re perfectly fine with the old version, it isn’t going anywhere, so you can keep running it. In fact, both versions use the same infrastructure, and items read in one are updated in the other, so you can keep switching back and forth, no problem, and get the feel of the new one until you are comfortable with it.

The first thing you’ll see (after you login with some AJAX-y goodness, is a start page that you can customize with any of your favorite feeds. At any point, you can drag a feed onto the start page and it will be displayed whenever you login, or whenever you return to the start page (which you get by hitting a tiny icon next to the “My Library” link). Mouseover a headline for a preview, or click on it to read the whole article. You can drag the boxes around and arrange them however you’d like.

Reading your articles can work the same way as before. Click on a folder or feed, and the items in it start loading. Unlike before, the items in your feed aren’t marked as read until after you’ve had a chance to read it. The item will be surrounded by a dark border, and that means you’ve read it and the number of unread items goes down by one. If you click on a giant feed, you don’t have to worry about finishing it now, because if you close your browser or go read a different feed, it’ll still be there, unread and waiting for you later.

You can always click “Mark All Read” to dump all the items in the current reading pane, but you don’t need to declare feed bankruptcy, because reading is fast, and you can always pick it up later.

The easiest way to read is probably by grabbing the scrollbar or just hitting “j” to move forward one article. Hitting “j” can become an obsession (next, next, next, next), or pulling the scrollbar is a great way to zoom through the list, with Bloglines marking items as read as you zoom by them. Instead of loading all the feed items at once, it loads a bunch of them, and then when you get near the bottom, it loads in a bunch more. This keeps things simple, especially if you read a bunch in the beginning, then switch to a different feed.

Here’s the thing: That’s only one view of three. See, this view, in which full articles are displayed in a river of news and marked as you go along is called “Full View”, but there’s also “Quick View” and “3-Pane View”.

Quick View is obscenely useful. In feeds with a ton of items, especially feeds where only the title has any important information (like Craigslist feeds), Quick View lets you see them as a quick and dirty list. Straight down, read all the headlines, hundreds of them, in a matter of seconds. Click the headline, and you get to read the whole article as it expands just as it would look in Full View, so you lose nothing. It doesn’t mark anything read until you click on it or click “Mark all read”, so if you need to see the headlines for an entire feed or folder fast, and come back later for detail, Quick View is your new best friend.

3-Pane View is very similar to Quick View, but it works more like Outlook and other email programs. The top pane is basically Quick View, but when you click on a headline, instead of expanding, the full article appears in the bottom pane.this keeps the flow a little more stable, and can be very appealing for some users. The main thing is, you get to decide what works for you.

However, the beauty doesn’t come in choosing the right view for you, it comes in choosing the right view for each particular feed. See, Bloglines remembers that you switched to Quick View for a Craigslist feed and Full View for a TechCrunch feed, and it gives you that particular view every time you load that feed. You don’t have to tell it to do that, it just remembers what you do and delivers it for you the way you want it.

Why is this so great? Because not all feeds are created equal. Some feeds you know write great articles, or have all the meat in the snippet instead of the title, while other feeds are title or nothing, and your reading habits are different for every blog. The three views are dead easy to switch, they differentiate between different sites, and they put the user back in control. As Bloglines learns how you use it, it gets better, and it becomes impossible to even consider going back to anything inferior.

A few other things: Feed management is far easier, thanks to the ability to drag and drop. You can re-order items, create and populate folders, and just move stuff around, all without breaking a sweat. My feeds were getting mighty disorganized (because I’m lazy), and an hour after getting the new version, I had re-ordered them without even thinking about it while I was reading the news.

Feeds no longer run out of room at 200 items! If you have a big feed, they’ll keep giving it to you, so you don’t miss anything if you go away for a few days.

I got to speak with Eric Engleman, the new GM of Bloglines, last week, and he ran me through everything in the new Bloglines. I’ve been a longtime user of Bloglines, and I live in it. It’s where I spend most of my day, how I get my news, and, realistically, Bloglines is the internet for me. Still, in spite of my love of Bloglines, I was afraid it was a dead project, and I actually made an effort to switch away from it to Google Reader, but Reader’s performance dissapointed me.

Now, I don’t have to worry, because it’s very obvious that Bloglines is in good hands. The last year or two, Bloglines has languished, as the small group in charge of maintaining it concentrated on scalability and back-end issues, and the user interface just sat around while the rest of the web passed them by. Eric joined at the end of May, and a lot of what you see here is the result of a renewed effort to make Bloglines a powerhouse and a valuable part of IAC/Ask.com’s portfolio.

If they could do all this relatively quickly, things are only going to get even better, and fast.

The verdict? Google Reader is going to have a much harder time competing with the new Bloglines. This version is faster than Reader (in my experience, even using it in Opera, an unsupported browser), and possibly even faster than the old Bloglines. In the last few days of using the new Bloglines, I’m working faster and easier than ever before, and that’s just amazing.

You’d honestly have to be crazy to not try this, and I’d be shocked if they didn’t get a lot of people switching back. The new version is rock-solid, and while it has quirks, it has no obvious bugs. Without a doubt, you’re looking at the best feed reader on the internet as far as I’m concerned. I can’t stress enough how much I’ve been enjoying using this.

Give it a shot, tell me what you think. You’ll be surprised, I guarantee it.

August 27th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Ask, Blogs, General | 8 comments