Legal Commentary

Eric Goldman laments that Bloglines randomly drops his feeds and for that reason (among others) he is switching to Google Reader.  I am relatively new to online readers - I have always used Firefox bookmarks and/or Sage Extension for Firefox, both of which work quite well for what they are.  Portability, however, is a problem.  I toyed around with rss feeds on my own website (which has rss modules) and on my yahoo, but those aren't the same as a reader.

So, I started with the base Bloglines product - yuck.  Terrible interface, and not intuitive at all.  I do, however, like getting email list and searches in my rss feeds.  It took about 10 minutes to move to the beta product, which I think is quite great - it allows for quick, full, and three-pane viewing, including a slick iframe that allows me to see the original page (useful for site that have short pre-jump intros or interesting comments (like Prawfs, for example!).  It does have its problems - feeds don't always update in a timely fashion, and links to the backend database seem to be broken a lot.  That said, it is a beta and I have high hopes.

Compared to the beta version, Google Reader is simply unusable.  The list is nice, but you have to jump out to see the full page - no better than my Sage reader in that sense.  Also, the menu at the top left is mostely useless to someone who has no interest in sharing feeds or doing whatever else is available there- on my laptop the feeds don't appear until the bottom of the screen - pretty annoying.  I also don't like being logged in for Google search (privacy concerns), and Google Reader requires me to log in.  Eric mentions some "oddities" in Google's product, but I think that it goes way beyond that - I don't think Google Reader is anywhere on par with Bloglines - at least not the new beta version.

Given that this is all new to me, I am willing to be convinced otherwise.  Is there a nicer Google version I don't know about?  Some way to improve the viewing or rearrange the menus?  Is there another online reader that is better than both of them?