I’m a big, big fan of Bloglines for reading my RSS feeds. Despite effusive pitches from various people for me to switch to Google Reader, and a brief flirtation with the Big G, Bloglines still has me. And it’s for one simple reason:

Bloglines is social.

If you click on any feed within Bloglines, along the top of the screen is a link: “XX subscribers”. Click on this, and you can see who has subscribed to the blog through Bloglines (and agreed to make this public) – but more importantly, you can click on their username to see what else they’re subscribing to – a great way to pick up on new blogs (the Related Feeds link in the same place presumably uses the same information).

But for the past few months Bloglines has been trialling a new beta version – and it’s not social.

In the beta version you can see how many subscribers a blog feed has – but nothing more. Even the ‘related feeds’ link is absent. I’m hoping they’re reinstate these, but I’m not holding my breath. (As an aside, I also dislike the fact – shared by Google – that it’s hard to click through to the original post)

I’ve posted a thread on the beta forum; if you want to add your voice please do. In the meantime, I’m sticking to version 1.o.