iGoogle feed reader: weak

A couple of days ago I offered praise for the email feature provided by our all-knowing masters at Google. Today, however, I come not to praise Google, but to throw brickbats at it.

I have a number of blogs and news sites to keep up with, but have never cared for using a dedicated newsreader reader for the purspose - it’s just one more thing that have to think about. NetNewsWire for the Mac is an okay program, as is FeedDemon on Windows, but I can’t be bothered to switch from my browser to those programs and back again. Nor is the web-based and popular Bloglines very appealing to me; I’ve tried it a few times but the navigation is clunky and I can’t get around how hideous it is. Bloglines makes Gmail look sleek by comparison.

I use Google a lot. The advent of iGoogle allowed me to set up headline feeds for the sites I like to follow, and the combination of feeds and the search feature seemed convenient enough for actual use. I was happy enough with the arrangement until recently. The present problem is that iGoogle is habitually late in fetching new feeds from my subscribed blogs - unacceptably late. There are blogs whose displayed headlines are five, six, seven entries old. Unacceptable. Refreshing and cache-clearing on my end does nothing to remedy this. Google Reader is no better.

So…what? Back to Bloglines (again)? They’ve had a beta design going for a while which is less abjectly ugly than the previous version, but I need to play with the navigation to see how it flows. Not loving it so far.

I predict an ongoing search for convenient options.

Update: Am using Bloglines Beta now. Must grudgingly admit to not hating it. So far!

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