Today, I looked at a couple online RSS aggregators, Bloglines and Pluck Web Edition. Not my first look at either, but I wanted to know if there was any progress in the general usability of online aggregators. I have to say I was disappointed. Both still have performance problems that make them very painful to use. Bloglines is impossible to use, unless you have the special power to read the Mark Fletcher's mind. Sorry Mark, hire an usability expert quickly! As for Pluck, I simply couldn't get my blogroll imported. When I imported the items, it would respond "The item already exists in that folder" but when I clicked on the folder, it reports "There are no items in this folder." I also got a phantom subscription, which was weird. It definately felt like a data integrity issue
Update: I think I figured out the Pluck OPML import bug. It's one of those bugs that has been passed down thru the ages. Dare and the original users of OPML used the title attribute instead of the text attribute in exporting their blogrolls. Most aggregators now look for both to compensate for the earlier bump in the OPML highway.
Now that I've worked around the OPML import bug, I find one thing lacking from Pluck, I don't like the Inbox paradigm, rather I'd prefer a River of News.
