Tonight while browsing the internet in Borders I happened upon a pretty cool and useful website. You'll recall that I recently posted about Google's Reader web based application that allowed you to track changes to websites and blogs. Tonight I found one that appears to be a bit more mature. It's called Bloglines, and albeit I have only been browsing through it for about 15 minutes, but must admit that I am somewhat blown away by what I am seeing.
It took about 30 seconds to create a free account after which I was able to subscribe to feeds in certain categories. The prepackaged bundles that Google offers are few in number compared to what is immediatley available on Bloglines. I clicked off about 30-40 subscriptions for starters and began reading.
When first using a site/application like this there is the tendency to over-subscribe to feeds. There is only so much you can read in a single sitting. Each individual feed could have from 1 to up to 20 or 30 new articles depending on how busy a site it links up with. The links should stay live if the sites are using permalinks which is true for most mainstream blogs ,but possibly not with websites. So if you want to read it make sure you read it now.
One thing that was cool was that the feed panel on the left hand side automatically updated as new feeds were available; no need to refresh it manually...nice touch.
I have no doubt that Google's Reader application will gain in popularity and maturity as they have probably the most visited site on the net. Still it's nice to see something in IT that is not borne of a behemoth of a corporation.
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