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I tried to jump on the bandwagon and switch to Google Reader but today was the last straw; I'm switching back to reliable old Bloglines. Here are my reasons:
1) A few of my feeds have mysteriously "disappeared". Enough said on this one...still in beta I guess.
2) For some reason my folders have all been changed - all spaces and periods have been removed and no special characters are allowed. So my folders labeled .NET General, ASP.NET, Lucene & Nutch, Health & Nutrition, Web 2.0, etc. now say net-general, aspnet, lucene--nutch, health--nutrition, and web-20 - not cool. Why would you change this for your users when the original implementation was already working?
3) It's not easy to subscribe to a feed and add it to a folder. If you added the Subscribe... link on your toolbar or as a bookmark then you have to view the feed in Google Reader first, click on the Subscribe link at the top right hand corner of the page, then click down at the bottom left hand corner on Manage Subscriptions... then scroll down through every one of your feeds until you find the one you just added (there are no descriptions here either so it's difficult), then click on the dropdown list on the right hand side of the screen and add it to the folder you want. Oh, and if you try to click on one of your folders named "web 2.0" - forget about it - you get an error. Why? Because Google doesn't accept periods in the folder name anymore - even though the invalid selection is still in the list for you to choose.
4) Since Google conveniently renamed all of my folder names with dashes in place of spaces and special characters like &, exporting to another reader is now tough because the names are all different now. So any new feeds that I've added in existing folder won't match up in my OPML file when I do my export. No more switching back and forth easily without some manual cleanup.
5) I miss all of the nice icons in Bloglines in the feed list on the left hand side of the page. It adds a little character to each feed.
Right now I'm reading "The Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki. One of the things he talks about is getting to market quickly and not waiting to release the perfect product before you go broke. But, he says not to release too early or you might release something that is unusable or riddled with bugs. The key is to find the right balance, then listen to your users and then you'll end up with the right product. Did Google release to early? Are they listening to their users?
