When I said yesterday a month ago that Twitter vs. Jaiku is shaping up to be another VHS vs. Betamax (yeah, I write here a lot… I promise), I was aware that the bigger battle is obviously Bloglines vs. Google Reader. Oh, I mean HD-DVD vs. BluRay. Sorry.

Anyway, now that Read/WriteWeb has a post about the war between the two biggest Web RSS Readers, I’ll throw in my 2 pennies.

Bloglines = still better.

I’ll admit, I used Reader for a while, and got used to it, and probably would have stayed with it if Bloglines hadn’t launched their new beta. For me, it’s basically the same as the old Bloglines with two extra keyboard shortcuts. That is to say, I use it in essentially the same way as I did before, but instead of going feed-by-feed using the “s” key, I now use the “f” key to go from folder-to-folder. It’s only a slight increase in efficiency over the old Bloglines, but it’s definitely better than the Shift+J -> Shift+O required for Google’s Reader.

The other big improvement (aka: new keyboard shortcut #2) for Bloglines comes with the addition of the “o” key. This is new for them, but the same as Reader’s “v” key. So, it’s not a win for Bloglines, but it does make the Beta better than the original, and helps to push the whole-of-the-parts ahead of Google.

There’s a bunch of other new features in the beta Bloglines, but after trying some out (like the 3-pane view), I chose to stick with the basic default set up (which, as I said, is pretty much the same as before). And still better.