Bye-Bye Bloglines, Hello Google Reader

I’ve used Bloglines as my RSS reader for almost 4 years. Bloglines has become an essential part of my daily routine. In general, whenever I log into the computer at work, I keep three windows open all the time–my school email account (on GroupWise–don’t get me started), my main email account (Gmail), and Bloglines. As a result, I interact with Bloglines dozens of times per day. Among other things, Bloglines is my main source of online news and events (more so than email alerts or going to individual websites). It’s also my main blogging resource–it’s how I read other blogs and usually decide what material to blog myself.

Bloglines has never been perfect, but for the most part, I’ve been a satisfied customer. Indeed, I’ve personally evangelized Bloglines to at least a dozen other folks over the years, such as my wife, who now uses it religiously to read vegan blogs and Cute Overload.

However, I’ve hit my limit with Bloglines. Among my gripes with Bloglines is that it randomly and mysteriously drops some subscriptions without announcing it. All of the sudden, I’m unsubscribed. I don’t always notice, and being surreptitiously dropped is annoying. But the last straw is that for the past week or more, Bloglines simply has not updated about 15% of my subscriptions. It’s offered no explanation for the problem (or even identified that there is a problem) and I haven’t been able to develop a workaround. This simply doesn’t work for me. I carefully manage my list of subscriptions, so when a sizable chunk of them aren’t updating, I’m operating with a big blind spot. Uncool.

As a result, I’ve decided to cut over to Google Reader. I can already tell that there are some oddities of Google Reader that I will have to cope with (for example, the AP feeds don’t work very well). However, as far as I can tell, it’s way more stable than Bloglines.

So many thanks for a great 4 years, Bloglines. I’ve enjoyed the ride, but I am moving on.