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Bloglines adds Playlists and Glimpse
Bloglines has just pushed out an update that adds a tab to its interface called Playlists. Here's how they describe Playlists:Playlists lets you create short groupings of feeds to access from your main list. Create as many as you like, and use them to personalize your Bloglines experience that much more. Create them, change them, even delete them--all without changing your original "tree" of feeds. What song playlists are to your MP3 library, Bloglines Playlists are to your Bloglines blogs & feeds.
I'm not certain that I understand the need for yet another level of organization to my feed list, particularly when I feel overwhelmed with attempting to keep the main list in order. I suppose for people that maintain thousands of feeds, most of which they rarely visit, this could be a useful way to keep an eye on lesser-visited feeds.
In terms of keeping an eye on things, Playlists come with a new feature called Glimpse. Essentially, Glimpse is invoked when clicking on a playlist that contains feeds. Every feed in the playlist is shown, with the first 5 post titles showing, and if you hover over the title, a tooltip shows with the beginning of the content from that post.
Glimpse feeds can be dragged around and reordered. In fact, this particular feature makes it feel eerily like Google Desktop, NetVibes, and all those other personalized desktop pages that are floating around out there. I suppose that's not a bad thing, but it has definitely been done before, and it's not clear to me that this adds much value to the feed reading experience. That being said, it's nice to see Bloglines adding functionality.
Now how long until they take a page out of Google Reader's book and only mark posts as read as you actually read them? I'm certain that one feature has caused many people to switch from Bloglines to Google Reader.
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsParkerNov 10th 2006 4:34PM
I think this could be handy for people who don't read all their feeds regularly. At least with Glimpse they can now quickly jump to the stuff they really want to see.
I'm subscribed to 99 feeds and I read them all. There's no priority list for me, if a feed has new content, I want to read it. Right now. So Glimpse doesn't have much of a purpose for me, that I can see.
As far as unread counts are concerned, I prefer Bloglines' method to the individual-post method. Mainly because even though I read all my feeds, many times (for active blogs like Engadget) I just scan headlines and decide which posts I'm interested in. I'd never want to read every single post just to mark them as read. Maybe the other service have features to get around that; I haven't tried them. I'm happy with Bloglines. :-)
ParkerNov 10th 2006 4:34PM
Err, when I say "Glimpse" I mean "Playlists." Whatever. I'm not using either one at the moment. :-)
Peter GasstonNov 10th 2006 4:34PM
Now how long until they take a page out of Google Reader's book and only mark posts as read as you actually read them? I'm certain that one feature has caused many people to switch from Bloglines to Google Reader.
Actually, that's exactly the reason that keeps me with Bloglines.
Jason ClarkeNov 10th 2006 4:36PM
Yes, but it'd be easy for them to make it configurable. And with the hotkeys to jump from post to post, it should be trivial to mark posts as read as they go by on your screen.