I use Bloglines all the time. Here’s what I love about Bloglines:
- It’s an easy way to keep an eye on the blogosphere, or at least the parts of the blogosphere that I care about.
- I can access it from anywhere and it saves my state. My browser knows the password, so it’s one-click from work/home/laptop to start reading Battelle, the Spam Huntress, Mapping Hacks, martinibuster, or even the wet/burnt dog hair guy at Yahoo, and I can always pick up where I left off.
- I can choose whether to read a lightweight comic feed or tackle the voluminous-but-useful set of posts that is the Search Engine Watch blog.
- I don’t have to worry about funky spelling, capitalization, or a name that sounds close to “Google” (pet peeve of mine). If the name were BloogleLyNes, I’d probably like it less. TiVo gets a pass on capitalization because they rock so hard, but I wish more sites chose easy, memorable spellings. I’m looking at you, kuro5hin and The Cap’n’s Log 😉
- Bloglines’ favicon is clean, distinctive, and memorable. Easy to pick out from my personal toolbar folder.
Here is what I wish Bloglines would change:
- As far as I can tell, you can only accumulate 200 posts from a feed before posts start dropping on the floor. Mark Fletcher, can you boost that to 400 or 500? I don’t want to have to check ThreadWatch that often; sometimes it puts me in a foul mood, so I’d rather save it up for a while and then read it all at once. 😉
- Sometimes posts appear as unread more than once. I know that usually it’s because of an update to the post, but sometimes it doesn’t look like the post has changed. Maybe a different color instead of bold/black for updated posts?
- When something has to go down for an upgrade, you see the [bloglines plumber]. Less plumber time is always good. 🙂