Which is the best online feed reader?

Recently I added feedburner technology to both this blog and Bitter Women after reading an article by Becky at Preblogging which stated: “One recent thing I’ve noticed on blogs that I read is that they don’t offer or promote their email feeds. You have to remember that not everyone who visits your blog will be so technologically advanced as you, and may not have a RSS reader service that they use. For these people, FeedBurner’s Email Subscription is the way to go.”

I had never really paid attention to all the free web-based feed readers before, since I’ve been perfectly content to use the in-browser RSS readers… but lately I’ve been reading a LOT of blogs, so was up for finding something a little easier to organise and to see if there was any hope of a reader that would keep me from going cross-eyed.

I decided to look at five: Google Reader, News Gator , Bloglines , and (I had others listed here, but after looking into them, didn’t feel they were worth the time or space to review.)

---

Google Reader: The biggest problem here was simply that I found it difficult to do the simplest thing, which was change the name of a folder (can’t be done) and rename a folder (I had to google it, which is an amusing coincidence.) I found their help files incomplete and unsearchable.On the plus side, it was pretty, and if you’re familiar with Google already, being a gmail user, you would probably find it intuitive. However, non gmail users might flounder a touch, like I did, with the basics. Questions like: what the heck is “Add a Star”?Others have seen huge growth with GoogleReader, and Problogger suggests that their market share is growing enormously, based on their own statistics.

Score: 80% = Grade B

Looks: 8/10 - Nothing to complain about, but looks exactly like everything else Google has ever made.
Ease of Use: 8/10 - Reading and adding easy, organising a tad tedious at first
Extra Features: 8/10 - I suppose I gave it a non-perfect score because I felt that in this case “extra” = “useless”. You can read your “stats”… not of your own site but of your reading habits, “star” things, which puts them in a separate folder. This is useful, perhaps, for articles you want to come back to later, but I find I use my browser’s bookmarking for that, and having to look in two places would be twice the work.

Some resources on Google Reader:

• Newbie’s Guide To Google Reader
• GoogleSystem

---

NewsGator: I was impressed with the looks of NewsGator… very pretty with lots of ooh and ahh buttons and I found it very easy to use. The downside here for me was a big one though: the slick ajax-y features took a while to load. When I’m in blog-reading mode, I’m in short-attention-span mode, and waiting for, well anything, makes me twitch.

Score: 76% = Grade C+

Looks: 9/10 - Slick and fancy. Gorgeous. Downside: Inserts Google Ads between posts you’re reading.
Ease of Use: 5/10 - The slow loading speed really bothered me and sometimes it would open up popup windows with extra information… great, except they weren’t moveable or sizeable, and they ran off the screen so I couldn’t read everything in them.
Extra Features: 9/10 - Some looked great: the plugin for Firefox and IE, and the tools for bloggers were nifty, such as being able to add ratings to your site. Some were silly, like a newsgator screensaver. I can’t imagine the meeting in which that sounded like a good idea.

Some resources on Newsgator:

• Honestly, I couldn’t find any links to recommend, but the upside is that their help system is excellent, and includes tutorials, screenshots, and detailed explainations and walkthrus.

---

Bloglines:

Score: 83% - Grade B
Looks: 8/10 - Suitable, but nothing to write home about. The layout was simple and clear and easy to navigate.
Ease of Use: 8/10 - Easy to sign up, easy to use. I didn’t like the way they grouped posts together. I found it harder to determine what was new than when I was looking at Google Reader.
Extra Features: 9/10 -Frankly the selection was dizzying, and I don’t want to take the space to go into all the features they have (A few are drag-and-drop feed management, news, notifier, even weather in their new Bloglines Beta), but Bloglines is much more than just a feed reader. This could be a plus or a minus, depending on what you’re looking for. I give it high marks, because I think it’s likely those looking for a free online RSS service would like to be able to do a lot of things in one place.

Some resources on Bloglines:

• Tips and Tricks on About.com
• TechnologyEvangelist

---

Summary: Now this is where I find myself scratching my head. I went through and compared all the sites, and had determined beforehand I would use the one that got the highest score. But when I look back, I gave Bloglines a higher score, but find myself acknowledging that I would actually use Google Reader over Bloglines.Why? Bloglines scored higher on extra features, but I doubt I’d use them. Google Reader scored lower on ease of use because I had a bit of difficulty finding help on how to do some basic things… but… now that I know how to do those basic things, I just like it better for intangible reasons. Maybe the familiarity of the interface was more appealing than I realised at first glance.But build me something with the sexiness of Newsgator, the speed and easy layout of GoogleReader, and the extra features of Bloglines, and I’m there.