thoughtstart

Bloglines just announced the launch of Bloglines v3 in a beta open to the public. The announcement reads:

Blogliners we’re proud to introduce a beta of our latest redesign of Bloglines. Our About Beta overview outlines the key features a personalizable home page, 3 reading-views and drag-and-drop foldering in an Ajax interface. We’re inviting you, the Bloglines fans, to the new Bloglines beta in the redesign cycle to provide us feedback. We look forward meeting you in the forums or at conferences to brainstorm on ways to make Bloglines an even better feed reader.

The current Beta is available for Firefox and IE 7 browsers. Of course, the full-featured original Bloglines will still be available during the Beta period.

Enjoy!

- The Bloglines Team

By far the most exciting additions, for me, are the river of news view and abandoning the marking of a feed as read when selected in the feeds panel. I rarely have the time to read through all of a feed’s articles in one sitting therefore I’ve never been able to warm up to Bloglines before.

Navigation

In the beta reader, you can now navigate through the list of articles Google Reader style, using just the j, k and space keys. J and k scroll down and up, respectively, one article at a time while marking the current article as read. Space seems to be doing double duty - scroll down through a long article and, for short articles, scroll down an entire page while marking all of the page’s articles as read. The scrolling is fluid and good visual feedback is given to the read state of an article. Keyboard shortcuts are available for moving between feeds and for selecting a folder of feeds. One weird omission seems to be the lack of a keyboard shortcut to open an article in a new window or tab. There is a message in the forum asking if this is a bug or just not implemented yet.

My Start Page

The start page, labeled “My Start Page” is basically a page filled with feed gadgets. The page is populated by dragging one or more feeds from the subscriptions list to the page. One or more widgets will be created, each listing the newest five articles in the feed. A “view all” link is provided at the bottom of each gadget. I don’t believe the widgets are resizable at this point in order to display more than just five items. On a 1024 x 768 screen you should be able to fit 4-6 of these boxes before scrolling. The idea is that, upon logging in to Bloglines, you are immediately presented with the feeds you track most.

My Library

Unfortunately, the same new start page somewhat breaks the river of news model. The problem is that it also serves as the top of the feeds hierarchy, labeled My Library. In order to bring up all news items in all feeds, sorted with the most recent on top, you need to create a folder and move all feeds into it. You would then select this top folder to start reading, similar to selecting “All items” in Google Reader. Fortunately, the expansion state of the folder is preserved between logins.

Search

The Search function in its default “Find articles” search mode does not seem to perform a search through your own collection of feeds, but rather through all the news articles in all the feeds tracked by Bloglines. The other options are “Find feeds” and “Search the Web”.

Upcoming Features and Conclusion

A new mobile reader, personalization, the handy Bloglines disposable addresses and an updated API are listed as key future activities. Sharing and link-blog creation and are also listed as upcoming features. This is excellent news!

I will be tracking this beta; so far it seems to be a good step forward to finally create some competition for Google Reader.