CNet's preview release of Newsburst is quite good. It combines some of the better features of Bloglines and Kinja. It's not perfect yet, however. For one thing, the tabs don't maintain a selected state when you click on them. Also, the "Stream" view would be much better if it allowed you to browse backwards chronologically through the spool of the entries that have been collected. Kinja does that extremely well and has been my news reader of choice because of that one feature. It follows how one type of behavior -- watching news feeds as they arrive. My other common behavior is to read a particular site in my news reader. Bloglines does that well with their multi-framed interface. My client reader, NetNewsWire does an even better job. Kinja doesn't let me do that at all for some reason.

Newsburst seems to address these multiple news reading behaviors, providing an interface that serves all. But does it do it well? Yes and no. I like the features, but the simplicity and speed of Kinja still win me over. Newsburst just feels a little bloated and sluggish right now. Maybe they'll evolve it some more and I will come back and love it. I guess I'm still looking for the perfect reader. For now it looks like I'm still going to pogo between Kinja and NetNewswire.

Update. And the best thing about NewsBurst is that I sent them feedback and I was almost immediately contacted by someone high up in their product development team. They're already working on the issues I mention above. This will be an application to watch.