Last night while looking at the new Feedburner design (well done guys!), I noticed that my subscriber stats figure has suddenly jumped. My current count of RSS subscribers in Feedburner is 3744. The main reason is that Rojo has just been added to Feedburner’s numbers – previously it was missing. What surprised me is the extent of Rojo’s impact on my stats. Rojo has overtaken Bloglines as the number 1 RSS Aggregator for my readers. Here is my current top 10:
Rojo Bloglines NetNewsWire Newsgator Online ThePortNetwork Firefox Live Bookmarks MyYahoo Google Desktop FeedDemon SharpReader
A few quick comments on that:
– 7 of my top 10 are web-based RSS Readers (I’m counting Google Desktop in that). And 7 of the top 8 are web-based! Possibly that reflects my own bias towards web-based apps, which presumably a lot of my readers share.
– On the other hand, NetNewsWire is still going strong in 3rd place, which probably reflects my geek cred 😉
– Rojo and Bloglines dominate my stats, which suggests to me that the other web-based readers have a lot of ground to catch up (and there are tons of new web-based feed readers on the market currently).
Coincidentally yesterday, before I found out about the Rojo numbers in my Feedburner, I decided to give Rojo another try. I’ve been increasingly frustrated by Bloglines – it doesn’t cut the mustard anymore in terms of organising one’s feeds, tracking topic feeds and in general adding value to my feed-reading existence.
Already I’ve noticed that Rojo’s performance has improved since I last checked (that was my number one complaint about Rojo) and its added some neat new functionality – e.g. you no longer need to physically click the “Mark as Read” button. So I’ll be using Rojo for the short term and perhaps in time it will convince me to stick around 🙂
My question to Bloglines: when are we going to see these new improvements you’ve promised in the past? You’d better hurry up, because it’s clear that Rojo is eating your lunch.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)