3by9

Speed Over Style

I’m a software designer, but I’m also a user, and that’s very important.

Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying that design isn’t how something looks or feels, it’s how it works. So when a service that I use more frequently than nearly any other service on the web starts chugging and coughing, its design is failing.

I’ve been a Bloglines user since early 2003 and it’s essentially how I keep abreast of information on the Internet. It was a leader in the space a few years ago, but now that dozens of other web-based RSS readers are freely available — including Google Reader — its growth is probably stagnant. I’m a die-hard user, refreshing my Bloglines subscriptions many, many times per day. I don’t use a desktop-based reader as that’d probably kill my productivity, so refreshing my feeds in Bloglines and seeing a bunch of new articles is fun for me. I only subscribe to around 40 RSS feeds, so when something pops up, it’s always something I want to read.

Lately, Bloglines has been having some serious problems. Often I’ll open it up and none of my feeds in the left sidebar will show. I’ve contacted Bloglines about this but haven’t received a response. It’s an intermittent problem as occasionally they’ll show for me, but it’s very annoying. Bloglines is an older, iframe-based experience, but they also have a new “beta” version that uses Ajax to refresh panels with articles, similar to other web-based feed readers including Google Reader. I dislike this version, mainly because it’s simply not faster than the iframe-version for reading feeds, and also because it doesn’t automatically mark all articles on a feed as “read” as soon as I click to see them, I have to manually click on each article panel or else the article count next to the blog title never decreases. All very annoying.

The other day I realized that even though Bloglines was having issues displaying feeds for me, the iPhone version of Bloglines (web-based, not a native app, accessible via i.bloglines.com) was still perfect and it’s what I use on my iPhone to read RSS feeds. I decided to load up the iPhone version of Bloglines (which is incredibly stripped down) in Safari and it worked perfectly. The iPhone version of Bloglines is very snappy even on an iPhone EDGE connection, so on a broadband connection in a full desktop-based web browser, it screams! It’s unreal fast. The fastest feed reading experience I’ve ever had.

And that’s the story of how I started using the iPhone version of Bloglines as my normal, desktop-based feed reader. Because it’s the fastest one on the planet.