I’ve been a big user of Bloglines ever since I started properly using RSS feeds. I’ve not wanted to use Google Reader before — it was clunky, fugly, slow and just really shit.

But Google Reader has been given more than a spring clean this week, and it feels a whole lot smarter. But Bloglines also had a subtle update which made it feel a lot smarter. I was going to stay with Bloglines, but then I found this page via Digg.

It’s alerted me to one smart new feature of Google Reader — no, I’m not talking about the easter egg. I’m talking about that ‘Next’ button. You drag it on to your toolbar and click it to take you to the website of your next unread feed.

Hopefully this can eliminate some of the problems with reading everything in an RSS reader. The tendency to skip posts, or the fact that sometimes images are missing from RSS feeds and — most importantly of all — that sadistic ‘unread’ count are all gone.

The only thing is, with the next button, will using Google Reader become a game to reach The End of the Internet?