Choosing RSS Readers

Jeremy Zawodny mentions that he’s recently switched to Bloglines. 

Me too.

I’ve been very pleased with FeedDemon on Windows over the past six months or so, and have been disappointed that I can’t seem to find a similar RSS reader on the Mac.  The biggest thing I miss is the ability to follow a link (either to the actual entry or to another site) within the same window (or on a new tab), without spawning additional windows. 

Using Bloglines in Safari works quite similarly, however.  I can right-click (okay, I use a two button mouse on a Mac, which probably makes me a heretic) and open links in new tabs, which is just fine. 

The (lack of) speed takes a little getting used to, as I’m used to the summaries already being on my machine, but that’s the price for using a web app.  The tradeoff is that I can check the feeds I watch (a metric ton of them, it seems like) on any web browser, and it knows what’s new regardless of where I am.  There’s also a pocket browser version, which I’ll be checking out on my e800 soon.

Bloglines is a very well implemented web app—the integrated management works well, you can mail your OPML to other people, generate a blogroll that stays in synch, and (niftiest of all, so far) you can add mailing list subscriptions to it and treat them as any other feed.  Now I can go back to watching a couple of Yahoo Groups I’ve been ignoring since I started using RSS readers…

All of this for free—can’t beat a deal like that!

The only thing I wish is that they had an applet (does Safari do applets?) that would add “subscribe in bloglines” to Safari’s right-click menu.

Check it out!