Well, it appears that Bloglines is beginning to feel a slight bit of pressure from Google’s Reader. Some new hotkeys are now displayed at the bottom of the feed window, and the “new” counters are now put in the title bar, along with the number of items that I’ve decided to keep new. Useful + Subtle = Nice.

I did take a look at Google Reader, and was quite significantly underwhelmed. I’m afraid it’s part of a downward trend with Google. The original Google app, search, was great for two reasons: (1) a very basic interface, and (2) excellent results. Gmail is a wonderful mail app (though I hate that I can’t use arbitrary headers as a source for filters, and a “Clean out all spam” button is sorely needed), its interface is mostly uncluttered, and its ‘results’ are really good. A step down from the excellent standard set by their search, perhaps, but still a very good web app.

The Google “portal” is the next gapp (heh) and the first place I saw kinks in the armor. Drag and drop is cool. the little animation as the edit pane slides over is cool. But it’s just, well, ugly, and severely lacks in polish, compared with My Yahoo!, presumably the target in Google’s crosshairs. I’ll admit to being a My Yahoo user way back in 1995, when it was in beta, before “beta was the new black.” So it’s got a pretty good head start. Still, though, I expected a whole lot more from Google with the ‘ig’ portal’s initial rollout. Definitely a step down from gmail, passable and usable, but not quality.

Now there’s the Google Reader, and the results are even more disappointing. Again, an interesting interface, cool effects, but it’s mostly useless as an RSS reader. While we get Google’s tags, I haven’t seen how to just look at a certain tag’s feeds. A still larger step down. Just barely usable. For hard core feedreaders (heavy feeders?) like me (there’s 176 feeds in my bloglines, both private and public, right now), and in its present incarnation. I do expect both it and the portal to improve over time.

As with the Google portal, I’ve not written it off yet; both remain as line items on my “To Evaluate” list. (In my paper planner, of course.) Nevertheless, if Google’s apps are “Web 2.0,” I’ll take My Yahoo and Bloglines and Web 1.99. At least, at this point. I seem to recall something about never using a point-oh release…

The big thing that prompted me to start rambling is something that Rui pointed out over at Tao of Mac: that the Google Reader uses the same basic hotkeys as gMail, and that they were vim keys.

I never noticed that they were my beloved k and j keys, but, whadda ya know, they are. That’s like, really really cool. One of the many reasons that mutt is my mailer is that I can use the cursor movement keys that I’ve learned throughout my vim life.

So what are the Bloglines hotkeys? Some really nice ones, like “r” to refresh the folder list pane (a Greasemonkey script I use puts a refresh link at the top of the pane, but that takes mousing), and “s” to move between subscriptions, but what moves between articles? “j” and “k”. oh, yes yes.

For all of you that think a text editor has to use a mouse, once you get used to these keys from gmail and bloglines and Google Reader, you really should give vim a try. There’s a reason why that stuff still works. Everything old is new again.