This week I decided to switch from Bloglines, which I had been using for a few months, to NewsGator. One of the reasons I made the switch was because I have been talking to Sandy Hamilton and Greg Reinacker at NewsGator about how we might work together with a couple of our larger customers. But I also wanted gain some perspective in a way that you can’t get from reading a feature list.
I started using Bloglines because I wanted an online newsreader and they were the primary choice when I was looking. Personally I liked their interface from the beginning though when I tried to introduce Bloglines to a number of people who were not very familiar with RSS the general response I get was that the interface was a bit overwhelming.
I'd tried to switch over a couple of weeks ago but for some reason the move didn’t stick. I think once a person gets used to something the lack of any of the features your used to creates a barrier. In any case, this time the move worked.
Below are a few of the things I like in Bloglines that I would be glad to see in NewsGator. They are all pretty minor but being a creature of habit I noticed them.
- Bloglines creates a header at the top of the lists of posts so I can easily click on it and jump to the main page of blog. This is also useful for going to a blog that doesn’t have in new posts. If I click on a feed with no new posts I at least have the header I can click on to go to the site.
- Bloglines keeps the position on the page that I am reading. In NewsGator, if you have a long list of feeds, when you are done reading one you have to scroll down again to get back to the same spot when your done. This is no problem for feeds at the top of the list but it creates some annoying scrolling for feeds at the bottom of the list.
- In Bloglines the counter of new feeds updates immediately. With NewsGator the feed counter doesn’t update until you take some action that refreshes the screen.
Overall though I was very pleased with the transition, NewsGator has a very competitive offering and I’m very excited about their vision for bringing the newsreader functionality to enterprise customers. I'm sure NewsGator's Online reader will have it's own unique set of features and I'll blog about those as I get more familiar with the product.
I see a lot of synergy between NewsGator's vision for bringing RSS to the enterprise and CustomerVision's new enterprise wiki. CustomerVision will be releasing our enterprise wiki product this month and I’m anxious to see the evolution in NewsGator corporate offering.
