reader.google.com

still a little buggy (imports, navigation, dealing with large subscriptions), but full of ajaxian goodness

• has labels (no more bloglines cludgy hierarchies)
• search (will work at some point i hope)
• stars to mark interesting content
• filters
• quick sorts by relevance/date
• no mousewheel scrolling (keyboard paging is a bit unnatural); i find myself trying to take the list of feeds and drag it
• shortcuts (they mimic vi - what a nice twist)
• it would be nice if i could point to the opml link, as opposed to saving it to a file first and then importing it
• i miss the social aspect of bloglines - the popularity of the feed by readers and the actual list of readers that subscribe to the feed (not to mention recommendations)
• when google feedfetcher accesses the feed, it does not show the number of subscriptions in the user-agent string like bloglines does

in the end it will take a while to get used to it; there is a barrier for entry with the way everything is organized - it is a step up from simplicity of bloglines and others that had a simple model of entries under individual feeds that in turn could be grouped. most of my feeds are tied to personalities - it is not a uniform sea of posts. on the other hand there are some long overdue features that bloglines lacks.

the overall experience at this point could be nicely summarized by “clunky” - the interface and the responsiveness. i have no desire to switch from bloglines at least for a while. hopefully this will spark some healthy competition.

some links:

• Google Reader: Big, blue, chunky water-wings
• Google Reader: Ajaxian RSS reader