Gotta like at least the concept of a product designed to the hardcore audience of RSS news junkies. Not people who read 2, 5 or 10 feeds a day, but those who use 200-400 or more.

That’s what BlogBridge, an open source RSS aggregator and organizer promises to deliver, so does it?

Test driving version 2.13
Downloading and installation was a snap directly from the site, no offsite downloads. During one of the opening screens you can sign up for a free account that will enable better synchronization between computers which I chose that option. The default option was “do not create service account” — nice. Info required was Full Name, Email Address, Password and Password confirmation. The system accepted my gmail addy with a + in it.

The next screen contained various “guides” which are default RSS feed setups for different types of users all prefaced with the word “experts” like: Advertising, Collab, Journalism, KM, etc. You can make and share your own lists as well. Not a bad idea for getting your own reading list circulated. Even though I have my own OPML file of RSS feeds, I decided to choose the “Tech Pundits” guide and see what blogs this guide listed.

The next setup screen asked for keywords to highlight within the chosen feeds. After selecting a few of those I clicked next and the database was created and BlogBridge restarted itself. In a minute I was at the screen pictured above.

Turns out the Tech Pundit guide was lacking with only 8 feeds. I was able to delete the guide and all associated feeds by going to Guides->Delete. Handy. Next I saw an import and export option and decided to put my most recent OPML file (a little dated since last update, frankly) through the paces and tried to Guides->Import. There is built-in support for importing an existing bloglines subscription if you give it your user/pass or just import from an OPML file. I chose the OPML file and clicked next and saw this:

The words “only 100 feeds” confused me. I thought this was for info junkies? What was up with this 100 feed limit? It occured to me that maybe this was a limit on importing feeds at one time so as not to completely overload the system during the initial setup process. So in order to nab the 373 feeds would I need to run the import three times? This was not explained in the software. Time to go for help to get the answer?

This is where I stopped using the service. If I have to stop and go looking for information that isn’t obvious, this pretty much ends my review process unless the software/service is just spectacular. I was promised one thing and the software actually delivered another (info junkies really do have more than 100 feeds). If the max for a single guide is 100 feeds, that won’t work (it isn’t, keep reading). Perhaps will come back to this one another day after another update. If you follow less than 100 feeds maybe you will want to check this out, but it’s not for me. It seemed to run kind of slow on my test system with a third of the feeds which is one of my gripes with java software in general.

Does BlogBridge deliver? Not for info junkies, at least.

Update 2/16/2006 9:07am PST: The developer of the service, Pito, responded quickly in the comments to point out that this 100 limit can “easily” be changed to more than 100, see comments below (thank you). The next version will have the default set to 500. He didn’t respond, however, to how slow it ran, or if there were tweaks to improve performance for those of us with many RSS feeds.

TOOLS -> PREFERENCES -> ADVANCED:

• First attended Seattle blogger meetup OPML of attendees blogs
• Review: CNET Newsburst RSS reader
• Blending FeedBlendr and Alertbear shows common weakness
• A possible practical use for Attention?
• Review: last 45 days of TechCrunch and OPML profiles date sorted
• TV Guide switches to 75% stories, 25% listings