I’ve been playing with “Rojo”:http://rojo.com for about a day. I have been exploring alternatives to “Bloglines”:http://bloglines.com for a while now, and this one looks promising. Basically, I need online feedreaders with tagging. And Bloglines doesn’t seem to be offering that anytime soon.

Rojo advertised itself as

…web-based service that helps information consumers efficiently discover, organize, read, and share dynamic content….Rojo helps users identify what content is most useful for them personally and Rojo’s community features enable users to easily share relevant content with friends and colleagues.

It has been around a long time, but I haven’t tried it until the “facelift announcement”:http://blog.rojo.com/rojoblog/2006/02/new_at_rojo_fee.html last week.

My impressions after a day are:

* It’s slow. (This “greasemonkey script”:http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/1575 is supposed to help, but I haven’t noticed the speed increase, to be honest.)
* Subscription is not convenient. This “greasemonkey script”:http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/2106 (again) fixes that. (see picture)

* Tagging and unsubscribing are fully AJAX. Smooth.
* I like Bloglines’ way of handling read/unread better. Rojo has many options you can set, but not _’click on a tag name shows all unread items with that tag and mark them unread’_ )
* Feed recommendation generally gives me good, well known feeds. I’ve heard of them and already decide not to subscribe. Unearthed gems are what I hope for.
* ‘Flagging’ works more intuitively than Bloglines’ ‘clipping’.
* I using ‘feedshare’:http://www.rojo.com/corporate/services/feedshare/ but I don’t get it fully yet. Better read that “TechCrunch post”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/02/16/new-blog-ad-exchange-at-rojo/ again.

Bottom line is, I’ll give it a few more days before deciding if I’m willing to trade Bloglines’ speed and ‘mark folder as private’ with Rojo’s more modern features.