Bye-bye, bloglines. No thanks, NetVibes. Greetings, Google!

(This is all meta mumbo jumbo about my quest for a new, better RSS Feed reader, so feel free to skip it.)

The past week I’ve been going through a major shift in my life — seeking out a new RSS feed reader.

I’ve been a longtime Bloglines user until a week ago when I kept getting internal server error pages on any feed that had more than 120 updates at a time. And loosing all that information just isn’t an option for my go-go lifestyle.

On the recommendation of a few friends, I tried Netvibes and I … really want to like it. But with more than 1,000 feeds, it’s just not very feasible to have 23827993240 tabs and widgets. Also, the speed of feed delivery seemed to be impaired by that massive number of feeds.

So I’m now with Google Reader. Although the interface isn’t totally my cup of tea (I feel like I need a 2400×1600 screen really cruise through my feeds efficiently… ::drool:: 2400×1600 screens… ). The top 1/3 of Google’s interface could really be compacted to show more feeds and less static navigation but I guess most people aren’t digging through hundreds of feeds. I also don’t dig that when I click to add a new feed Google, it always asks me if I want to add it to iGoogle homepage or to Google Reader. Google’s smarter than that. It should remember my selection, stop trying to force your iGoogle voodoo on me, Google! But I can deal with that.

What I really find indispensable is Google’s speed for feed reading. With the two views (expanded showing the whole shabang and list view offering a Gmail-like one line preview) I can wade through my reading in at least half the time compared to Bloglines because everything is so uniform, organized and loaded quickly with everything preloading in the background. The starring and tagging features are increasingly helpful also (as I start to wrap my head around new workflow options).

In general, I always try to support the underdog. And Bloglines has been great to me so far but I have to move on. I’m kinda afraid of having so much my freaking life secretly catalogued by Googlezon, since I use so many of their products throughout my entire day. (I swear by gmail for personal and work email, I use Google docs as my briefcase for just about everything, including blog entires I’m working on, obviously, Google search is big, and now they have my RSS feeds. If only they’d bought Delicious, Google would have basically my entire online life and DNA locked down and mapped out.)

Is there a lesson here for journalism? Well, even when your providing a ‘free’ online service, customers tolerate failure just as much as if they’re paying for it… In fact, I swear I remember Jason Fried from 37signals saying he found customers demand more from a free service than if they’re paying. (I can’t find a quick link to that though, so don’t quot me.)

Any other web-based feed readers you all recommend I check out?