With Feedmonkey no where near light of day (god damn paying job and all), I still have my eye out for a new reader.

Nightshade mentioned Abilon, recommended by a mutual friend. I’ve been using it for the last week, and have to say I have mixed feelings about it.

On the plus side, it imports and exports OPML, a “Newspaper” display showing the latest headlines, and I can reduce the update cycle down to 10 minutes! It even has a built in blogging tool.

BUT …

I believe it is still .NET/IE based, though there is no mention of it on the site. I still want my FireFox. It also behaves strangely at times, repeatedly downloading the same months old post. Plus the built-in blogger can only interact with Blogger, LiveJournal, and MovableType. Add to that some frustration with configuring feed properties on batch, and you have an experience only marginally better then RSS Bandit.

Of course, today’s annoucement about Google’s online reader sounded promising:

Google announced Google Reader, an ajaxian RSS reader application.

There have been a number of attempts at online readers, and this is a nice one.

What better way to display the posts in FireFox then to display it on FireFox? And by having the feeds online, I could read it from anywhere. I’m an early adopter so I ran off to try it.

First off, WOW it was slow. I am using it from my work PC, and it takes over half a minute to access ANYTHING! Granted it, everybody and their monkey (but not my Feedmonkey) is hitting the site today. I imported my feeds, but they only started appearing as subscriptions over the last 30 minutes. I can’t seem to show the latest headlines from a category in one go. Mind you, there is no hierarchical categories, we have labels.

I think I will take another shot at it in a couple of weeks, but so far, unimpressed.

The Feedmonkey … he hungers.