It’s funny, but I was thinking the exact same things about Bloglines today as what’s talked about in this post by Russell Beattie. I once paid for Newsgator for Outlook and I checked out their online site again today as I’ve really liked having my rss subscriptions online via a browser. I’m probably going to give it a go though one thing is already really frustrating me. I can’t seem to figure out how to rename a feed which, sad as it may sound, might be a dealbreaker for me. I like renaming all my subscriptions to the names of the authors instead of the owner-given names blogs have but I can’t figure out how. I’m now pretty much convinced I can’t.

It seems to have a feature I prefer over Bloglines. I have hundreds of subscriptions and not much time so I tend to get behind on my reading. With Bloglines, I sometimes choose not to even click on a subscription if it has too many entries because I know I won’t be able to get through them all at the time. Reading 30+ posts from one author in one sitting is rarely something I can commit to doing for some reason. If I were to click on it, then all 30+ of those posts are marked as read which potentially means I miss out on reading some of the ones I didn’t get to. I realize I can click on the “mark all new” link to make it as if I never clicked on them but that also would reset the ones I got to read at that time. The other option available is to mark specific ones as “new” but that is usually quite a few so it would be kind of tedious to do.

Newsgator seems to take the opposite approach: you click on a feed and you see all of the new articles and they’re not marked as read until you check them off individually (in some AJAX way, so it’s pretty quick and nonintrusive) or click on the “mark all as read” link. I think that would work better for me even though it’s really not much of a big deal and I’ve been using Bloglines for a pretty long time now and have been pretty happy with it. It just feels like nothing has been happening (at least anything that’s visible to the end user) for a while now and it made me curious about other services out there.