I thought it wouldn’t come to this…but I have decided to make the switch from Bloglines to Google Reader as the web-based news aggregator of choice. I have been experiencing too many delays in post updates in Bloglines lately (see a recent post by Walt Crawford on his blog along with the lengthy set of comments about this very issue). I don’t know why this is occurring but I am tired of waiting for things to get better. I have used Bloglines for a long time and although I waffled a bit when Google Reader first came out (I wrote a post about it some time ago), I decided to stick with Bloglines because of some annoying features, or lack of features, in Google Reader. Bloglines also made some good changes to their interface and that helped keep me a faithful user. When I began having persistent problems with delays in Bloglines, I thought I’d go back and have another look at Google Reader. I am glad I did, because in the meantime, Google has made a lot of fixes to the interface and improved it a lot. One of the things I most liked about Bloglines was its intuitive interface and support for keystroke shortcuts which are easy to use. Google Reader has had that from the beginning, too, but they weren’t as intuitive to use, I thought. And keystroke shortcuts are a big deal for me when it comes to using a news aggregator. It has taken me a few days to become accustomed to the Google Reader specific shortcuts, but I think I’m pretty proficient with them now and I am quite happy with the whole interface. Sorry, Bloglines, but for a service that is built upon the premise of timely delivery of information, I just can’t stick with you when I can’t rely upon you for timely delivery.