Why I Changed Feed Aggregators
For the longest time I've been using Bloglines to read RSS feeds. I've used standalone readers in the past (NewsFox and Viigo) but I've found that there's no way to sync them (I read feeds on 3-4 computers, as well as my phone) and that was a real problem for me. Bloglines is very clean and fast. It's easy to use and works well when I'm on my phone. However more and more I've been noticing it "down for maintenance", and I've noticed others use Google Reader so I decided to give it a go.
I exported my feeds from Bloglines and imported them into Google Reader. I noticed right away that the layout was familiar (since it was similar to GMail), however I would prefer if I could have subscriptions at the top of the left pane, with Home, Trends, etc below them. As I browsed, I noticed that there were a few other annoyances. One of the things I enjoy about Bloglines is that if don't want to read a certain feed, I can simply click on it as I work my way through new feeds. With Google Reader, if you don't visit the article, it isn't actually marked as read. While technically more accurate, it's not what I'm accustomed to, and unfortunately there isn't a setting to change this. The other annoying issue, was related to Google Reader on my Blackberry... instead of being able to browse based on subscription, the items from the feeds are grouped together and displayed chronologically. This is horrid design compared to Bloglines mobile solution, however I'm finding I can live with the pain in order to have the standard Google Reader UI.
The thing that finally won me over to Google Reader is shortcut keys. I love keyboard shortcuts. The less often I have to use the mouse, the better and Google Reader is great for that. g + u and then you can type the name of the feed you want to read. Even better though is for when I'm browsing my feeds. I can use Shift+n (down) or Shift+p (up) to scroll through my subscription list, Shift+o will open that subscription and then n (down) or p (up) will let me scroll through items in that feed, using enter to open/close the items. It is extraordinarily handy and I highly recommend it to anyone that hasn't tried it yet.