In the comments to a post I published this weekend, Cathy Thompson of Bloglines addresses the complaints I raised about the recent problems with the service:
Man, you guys are cold!
- Absolutely not BS. We’re not trying to hide anything. Point taken that we should blog an update.
- Bloglines has a blog and have had one since the service began. It is called Bloglines News, every member has an auto subscription. We post everything there, including service updates.
- Bloglines has several user forums, also live since the beginning. They are accessible on our site from the Services page, and you’re welcome to participate there.
Bloglines is not a massive faceless corporation. We’re a small team, still led by founder Mark Fletcher, dedicated to building a great free service. There’s no hidden agenda, no vast advertising conspiracy — our motivation is that we love Bloglines and we want others to love it too.
Running a service like Bloglines is a massive technical challenge. We add 2-3 million new blog and feed articles every day, and while that is happening machines break, databases bork, upgrades happen. We get frustrated when it doesn’t work the way we want, and we’re doing our best to get it right.
Thank you, Cathy, for responding. I have no doubt that the Bloglines team consists of great people who are trying really hard to deliver a good service. But in your comments you didn’t address a single one of the questions about your service. What is the problem? How extensive is it? When do you expect it to be fixed? What is your technical team doing to ensure that this problem won’t happen again? Why don’t your support people tell users that this is an ongoing problem when they send in a support request?
You say “Bloglines has a blog … called Bloglines News.” If you’re referring to this page, I respectfully disagree. This is an announcements page with an RSS feed. There were two posts in April (one a joke on April Fools Day), one in May, one in June, and four in July. In every case, the content was either a press release or a simple announcement of a server outage or scheduled downtime. The “blog” doesn’t accept comments, none of the entries are signed by a real person, there’s no sense of community, there’s nothing to give us a sense of what it’s like to run this service. Simply putting an RSS feed on a Web page doesn’t make it a blog.
You also say, “Bloglines has several user forums … They are accessible on our site from the Services page.” Cathy, I searched the Bloglines site for an hour and never saw any mention of forums. I finally found the link you’re referring to. For the record, it is buried far down a page headed Bloglines Services, with a bunch of bold headings aimed at developers. that says: “We have created several forums to discuss the Bloglines Web Services and to announce new developments.”
I visited the forums page, and sure enough there is a Bloglines Discussion group (“not monitored by Bloglines Customer Care” it says in italics) and a Bloglines Suggestion Box. According to the Bloglines Forums home page, there are 140 registered members. They’ve contributed a grand total of 150 forum posts since last October. That’s roughly one post every other day. Not exactly a lively spot.
In the meantime, the 330 people who subscribe to my feed through Bloglines are getting a crappy experience. This is the fourth post I’ve published in the past 24 hours, but no one who reads this feed through Bloglines has seen any of them.
Bloglines has earned an amazing amount of goodwill from the blogging community for its pioneering work. You want people to believe you when you say that running Bloglines poses “a massive technical challenge” and that you have “no hidden agenda”? Talk to us! Follow the example of the people who write the blogs you serve up. How you respond to this crisis will determine whether you build more goodwill or allow it to dissipate.
Ed Bott 
The answer is the one that you dismissed as BS in your earlier post: We have outgrown our capacity at our current co-lo and we’re in the process of moving to a new facility. This is constraining the speed we are able to index new posts. It is a temporary problem, one that will be resolved when the move is completed.
We are working to resolve this quickly and we’ll work to be more transparent from now on.
Just for the record, Cathy, when I said “That’s BS,” I wasn’t implying that your statment in the Merc was untruthful. I meant that it’s BS that I had to read an incomplete description of the problem in a Silicon Valley newspaper after struggling with the problem for days and not finding anything on the Bloglines site.
I’m sorry that you interpreted those remarks otherwise. I do look forward to seeing much more transparency from Bloglines.
Hi Ed
I’ve moved off Bloglines a little while back. As I posted on my own blog, there were 2 key reasons.
I wanted a non-browser based application that would sync across multiple machines, and still have a browser option for on the go checking, particularly with mobile version.
Bloglines was having a lot, and I mean a lot, of outages. I reckon the Bloglines folk will be able to quote uptime stats, etc, but at the end of the day, the plumber was no longer amusing, as I wanted to be able to check blogs when I wanted to check blogs.
Bloglines has been an innovator, and has a good service, but for me, FeedDemon coupled with the NewsGator online service is currently hitting the sweet spot.
Sure enough, your last four posts just showed up on Bloglines, including this one, although you posted them all yesterday.
I love Bloglines and don’t want to switch–can’t stand any of the others–so I hope they get this resolved.
Ahh, the beauty of blogs. You have helped me see the light. I have switched over to NewsGator and am very pleased with the service. Thanks for the pointer.