andthennothing.net

Google tried to enter the online aggregator space a few days ago with Google Reader. When I heard the news I thought that it might grab a lot of Bloglines users, since switching aggregator is as easy as 1) export OPML, 2) import OPML. At least it should be—Google Reader did only import 30 feeds from my OPML, the interface didn’t rock my boat (and work really poor in Opera), and was awfully slow. I quickly forgot about Google Reader.

Today Bloglines released som additional features, which is great. They haven’t added any substantial feature for ages (since the Ask Jeeves acquisition?). The main feature is keyboard navigation. This only makes my life (ok, a bit of an exaggeration) a lot easier. I use Opera as my browser which already have a lot of one character shortcuts so it’s a perfect fit. They have also done some changes to distinguish between unread and “keep as new” items (hopefully they’ve fixed the bug where “keep as new” items sometimes don’t show up as expected but you have to dig deep among the read items to track them down).

On the mobile version they have enabled the “keep as new” option which makes it even more useful and was previously one of my main gripes in the mobile version. They also enabled enclosure support which I find less useful but I guess some people will use it.

One feature I would like to see in the mobile version is to read only a configurable amount of items at a time. If I’m on the run I don’t necessarily have the time to sift through hundereds of mails in a mailing list or Alterslash stories in one go. A defect I’d like to get fixed is that changing folder doesn’t work in Opera for some reason.

I hope Bloglines will keep bringing small features like they’ve done today to facilitate managing the information flow. It’s certainly one of my favourite web apps! Yay for Bloglines!