Trying out Bloglines

Since the initial betas I've been a very happy user of NetNewsWire on Mac OS X, however a few weeks ago I read something (don't remember where) that piqued my curiosity about Bloglines. I decided to give it a try and it almost immediately replaced NetNewsWire as my primary RSS news reader. This was really surprising as I've been trending away from using web based applications for things like this and NetNewsWire was one of my favorite Mac OS X apps. It turns out Bloglines works really well and for me is much faster to use then NetNewsWire. I particularly like the search facilities in Bloglines, especially being able to subscribe to searches. I also really like the fact it shows all entries that have appeared in a feed even if they aren't still in the current RSS feed. NetNewsWire misses things from feeds because I don't want it constantly checking when I'm working on something else. I had switched to manual checking from once per hour as I found the updates were drawing my attention too often and impacting productivity. With Bloglines I just hit the bookmark when I have a lull in real work it's faster and easier then launching another app.

One thing that troubles me a bit about Bloglines is that the revenue model isn't clear. It's free to sign up and there's no advertising that I've seen, so I'm not sure how the service plans to generate revenue. Services with no revenue tend to not stay around very long. It's a great service and definitely worth paying for, if that's where it ends up. Just wish it was clearer up front.

Posted by Kimbro Staken