ON MY USAGE OF BLOGLINES

MIXING APPLES AND ORANGES

Today's TechCrunch post on feed aggregator Bloglines made me think about how my use of Bloglines has fallen off a cliff in recent months.  Long-time readers may remember my frequent posting on the company a few months ago, both positive and negative.

Don't get me wrong, I still install the Bloglines feed notifier on all my new PCs and Macs, and occasionally do read my feeds through it.

And I still use it to "save" new feeds that I may find interesting to track over time.

But thinking about it, the inflection point on my reduction of Bloglines use happened after I started using Google's "Google Sync" extension in my Firefox browser. 

For those of you unfamiliar with this terrific "product", it enables "automagical" syncing bookmarks, passwords, and other personalized settings ACROSS multiple computers (be they Windows or Mac).  I've raved about it in recent posts.

Now I totally realize that I'm comparing apples and oranges here.  Google Sync is not a feed aggregator and/or reader, nor was it designed as such. 

So what happened?

The lazy man's rule is what happened, I think.

I found that as I found new sites and feeds I wanted to track, I simply added them as bookmarks to my browser toolbar.

The advantage of this approach was that the addition got instantly added to every one of the computers I use via the auto-syncing.

It makes reading the feeds easier for the lazy user (that's me), as I can use Firefox's ability to open multiple tabbed bookmarks together to read my daily feeds and websites.

Now it's not as efficient, organized and neat as adding the site to Bloglines, but for most of the time, it's good enough and it works.

Also, this is not specific to Bloglines, but would have likely resulted in reduced use of any other feed reader I'd found myself using historically.

And that's an unintended consequence of technology designed for one purpose changing usage habits of another.

Curious if anyone else has had a similar experience.

Comments

[Danny]

I hadn't heard about the sync, but I do use Firefox bookmarks/tabs as a partial alternative to a feed reader. I've got a folder of about a dozen links I open in tabs at least once a day - one is Bloglines, also Gmail, several of the (aggregated) Planet sites, del.icio.us popular, #swig chatlogs, Achewood etc. Very convenient.

[Hailey]

I've got a folder of about a dozen links I open in tabs at http://www.ggtv.info/sitemap.htm least once a day - one is Bloglines.
You are right!!

[Amit Doshi]

Once I started using Opera Browser about a couple of months ago I pretty much stopped using any other reader. Its easy to add a feed, single click on the address bar, and has easy OPML export, which is an easy enough way to transport feeds for me at least.

[bing]

http://www.ggcz.info/sitemap.htm
Now it's not as efficient, organized and neat as adding the site to Bloglines, but for most of the time, it's good enough and it works.The lazy man's rule is what happened, I think.

[Kayla]

I like your post!!