I made the switch from Bloglines to Google Reader a while back, but I’m noticing a couple of things that are starting to become annoying.
First is slowness in listing new posts. I notice it most with my own posts on various sites, I’ll post and it won’t appear in Google Reader for 2-3 hours, and yet Google Desktop’s feed reader (I’ll share that in another post) picks them up fairly promptly.
Second is the refresh/ Ajax feature that shows what you’ve read. Sometimes it marks the content off as I read it, other times it doesn’t without clicking the refresh option.
Is it just me? It took me over 4 years to leave Bloglines so I’m not about to change away from Google Reader, but I’ve got wonder, after all I use a feed reader to stay up to date, not get stories 2-3 hours after the fact.
I see the second one all the time. I don’t know about the first since I haven’t really paid attention to the update speed.
I don’t notice the second problem very often, but I’ve seen up to a several hour delay with my own posts. I wonder if there’s some variable like the number of unread items, or the length of the post, but haven’t been able to identify anything in particular – it can be very frustrating.
I’ve seen both of these bugs, the second a lot more than the first.
I have a theory that the first bug has something to do with the frequency of the feed publications which dictates how often the reader checks the feed, I’ve sorta verified this by playing around with a couple of fake feeds. It also has something to do with how many other people are subscribed to the same feed
Yes the AJAX updating is an issue – see the link on my name for my brief example of ‘phantom’ posts.
The feeds I read all the time seem to be updated quickly, though I’m not always monitoring it.