I’ve been using the beta version of the Bloglines RSS reader, since I learned about the pending upgrade through Drew’s PR blog a few weeks ago.

I like the changes a lot and find the beta a big improvement over the current mainstream Bloglines, which hasn’t really changed in a long while.

The Bloglines beta developers have clearly taken a long hard look at Google Reader before designing their upgrade, as the two function in a very similar manner. I prefer bits of both. Google’s ability to easily share content with others through a web page or RSS feed, with a simple tick, is very useful. If you’re a blogger you can add the resulting feed to a box in a sidebar, say. In an intranet context it’s very easy to provide recommended reading lists to colleagues, who can slurp up your recommendations through their own choice of content aggregator.

However, I prefer the way the Bloglines beta keeps track of what I have and haven’t read. Bloglines won’t fetch items I’ve previously read unless I tell it to. Reader, by contrast, automatically appends them to the bottom of the list of unread items if you scroll down, with a subtle colour change the only indication that you’ve seen the item before. I find this tends to waste my time.

Neither app seems inclined to let me personalise how I view new articles. I’d like to read in reverse order - ie, starting with the oldest item I’ve not yet read and working forward in time, whereas the assumption seems to be that I will always want to read the newest item first.

This is not necessarily the case, particularly in the Google aggregator. If you read and tick to share items as you go along, your shared feed ends up reading backwards - the newest items from your reading list each day become the oldest items in your shared list, and vice versa.

I’m sure both Bloglines and Google Reader will become more flexible in the future. Neither yet does what I’d really like them to do, though. What I want is an aggregator that genuinely aggregates - that can take multiple feeds and group stories together by content. For example, if six of my feeds all include a new article covering the same topic, I’d like to see them grouped together in the style of Google News.