Several months ago, I wrote a comparison of Google Reader and Bloglines trying to figure out which one I would use. Well, almost 6 months have gone by and I am still using both.

And up until a couple of days ago I was still double-subscribed to most of my feeds. But then, a solution finally occured to me.

An epiphany of grand proportions!

Ok, no - not really. However, I did figure out what I liked the most of all about Google Reader beyond those features already mentioned - the Shared Feeds!

So as of Monday, I use Google Reader for shared feeds published by the likes of Robert Scoble and Eric Peterson and Bloglines for individual site feeds. There is still some overlap - how could there not be? But its far less, and so, far less annoying.

I’m going to get a recommended river of information on Google Reader and detail, detail, detail from bloglines - WIN WIN!

GR Team,

As you know, I’ve been putting your product up against Bloglines in some side-by-side testing to see which Reader should become my one and only. And as much as a I like my river of data, there is a glaring problem with it.

One of the best features of GR is the ability to share the items that I read with others and they with me. In fact, that’s the main reason why I started using it in the first place - a buddy of mine started sharing his reading list (which is when I started using GR) then, Scoble started sharing his ‘link blog’ and I found that a very compelling reason to use GR more heavily. I’ve since increased my usage and the number of shared feeds I subscribe to - and therein lies the problem. I’ve got a couple feeds that overlap completely in their theme (web analytics) and overlap greatly in their shared content. Can you see where I’m going here?

It’s VERY annoying to have to look at the same post two or more times. Presumably these posts have some sort of unique identifier (post id, or URL even) that you could key on and then only show it me once - right? You could use the fact that it is in multiple feeds to indicate that it has a relatively higher authority or some such, but please, only show it to me once. if I like the post and want to follow up on it, I’ll star it so I can come back to it later.

Besides the annoyance of having to scan through the same post multiple times it’s also skewing the personal reading stats that your keeping tabs on about me - accuracy is key!

Update:

I just found this Firefox extension for Google Reader! If the GR team adds a blogroll type function, it will be all over!

Summary

I typically use two feed readers - Bloglines and Google Reader but I’m starting to feel like I need to consolidate on one, but which to choose?

Why all of the sudden am I feeling this monolithic need? Well, the other day, for the first time ever (I have tried sporadically over the last several months) I successfully exported my subscriptions from Bloglines and imported them into Google Reader. Previously, Google Reader had refused to recognize my Bloglines OPML file as valid.

So, now that I have my subscribed feeds duplicated on two services AND Google started reporting subscriber numbers last week, in all likelihood I look like two subscribers when I’m in fact one (the more things change yada, yada, yada…) - apologies to all my web analytics pals whose subscriber numbers are now deliberately inflated because of me.

what i like about bloglines

There are two main things that I find really helpful from Bloglines.

The Firefox Bloglines Toolkit Add On (not developed by Bloglines, but made possible because of their API). This add on will periodically poll Bloglines and notify me via a little red dot that I have new items to read.

The sharing feature which serves as my blogroll (yep, that one over on the right side).

what i like about google reader

Ease of use and ease of reading.

Seriously, the river of data view (all new posts) is awesome. I can quickly scan scores of posts and focus on the ones that are of interest to me. I also think that (but have no proof) that Google Reader does a better job of handling multimedia than does Bloglines. Most posts I read in GR I read there in situ because, for whatever reason, the readability is high whereas I find myself clicking through to the original post much more often when I’m in Bloglines.

In a perfect world, either Bloglines would improve their site usability (Frames, really? What year is this again?) and the readability of the posts or Google would add a similar sharing feature and a notifier add on for Firefox and then I’d have a relatively level field to choose against but until then who knows?

What do you think? Which reader do you use (if either) and which do you like better and why?

So, the new Google reader is pretty cool, although I have to say that I liked the old look better.

But here’s what’s most intriguing to me…

…Did you notice that as you scroll through the lists of posts that the number of unread items goes down? Now, I’m totally daunted at the thought of trying to deconstruct Google’s JavaScript so I haven’t even attempted to ‘peek under the hood’. However, from a purely presentation point-of-view, it would seem that they might be using ‘onFocus’ to mark each item scrolled/scanned/read as read.

Why is that intriguing? Well it takes me back to a discussion I took part in back at Emetrics in April. The point of the conversation, to put it melodramatically, is that ‘the page view is dead’. One of the discussion participants declaimed that he wasn’t interested in page views because a single page might include multiple news items that he wanted to measure.

So if Google is using something of the sort I describe, couldn’t they easily hook that interaction into Google Analytics with a whole new metric? Something called ‘Post View’ or something less prosaic? Isn’t that we harp about when complaining about measuring Web 2.0/AJAX/RIA?

Here are some questions that pop up in my head while thinking about this:

1. Does onFocus equate to a person actually reading the post? When Eric Peterson launched his new vendor discovery RSS feed over the weekend, I quickly scrolled through about 50 posts in Google Reader but only actually read about 5 because I wasn’t really interested in which random site was using which random analytics tool
2. Are there any studies that show what the average time to read 50, 100, 200, 500, etc. words online is?
3. If such data as the above exists or could be executed with some rigor, could a combination of onFocus and time spent on that focus more accurately measure ‘engagement’ with an individual post?
4. What kind of KPIs might we drive out of the above scenario?

I guess if Peterson ever gets the “Virtual Web 2.0 Measurement Working Group” organized I can ask these questions there, but until then I leave them for you to ponder.