Well, it’s about time the Bloglines blog got updated. The new post acknowledges what any Bloglines user already knew:
We’re not going to beat around the bush about this. Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately. Why? In short, Bloglines has been busting at the seams like the Incredible Hulk.
All of us here at Bloglines have been foregoing sleep and social lives over the past several months to keep Bloglines running and preparing for our move to a new access center (with bigger britches and a very elastic waistline).
So hang tight because there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The move will happen soon; we’ll keep you posted.
Gee, that sounds great. Except that’s exactly what the people who run Bloglines were saying more than four months ago. Here’s the text of a post that appeared on the Bloglines announcement page on August 9:
Bloglines is experiencing some slowing in posting new blog and news feed articles during busy blogging hours. This is a temporary issue — we’ve simply outgrown our current facility. To fix it, we are moving our computer operations to a larger location that will give us plenty of room to grow. The slowdown doesn’t put any user accounts or subscriptions at risk, and everything will be back to speedy once our move is complete. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience during this process.
Sound familiar? (And don’t go looking for that August 9 post. It was deleted – “accidentally,” according to a response I got via e-mail from a Bloglines spokesperson.) I had a reasonably civil e-mail exchange with Bloglines’ media relations rep back in August, but when I asked how long the move to a new server center would take, my questions were pointedly ignored. I sent four separate e-mail messages to Bloglines representatives asking for an update. They ignored every one. I also sent e-mail messages to Bloglines founder and CEO General Manager Mark Fletcher. Apparently, he was too busy counting the shares of stock he received in the sale of Bloglines to respond.
Last August, Bloglines promised more “transparency” and committed itself to updating the Bloglines announcement page more frequently. (For the record, yesterday’s post was the first one since October 27. What other online business can get around to posting a progress report to their customers every seven weeks? CEO Fletcher hasn’t updated his personal blog since October 31, so I guess the Bloglines team is following their leader’s example.) Those were obviously empty promises. The company has apparently been unable to deal with technical issues and is either unwilling or unable to communicate with its customers honestly.
I used to recommend Bloglines enthusiastically. Today, I encourage people to use NewsGator, which blows its competitor away in every conceivable measure – most importantly, NewsGator knows how to communicate with its customers, offering frequent status updates, a lively discussion forum, and first-rate support.
Bye-bye, Bloglines.
Ed Bott 
Well, Bloglines service has been a bit spotty lately, but not bad enough to make me want to switch to something else.
I just wonder how they stay in business. What is their source of revenue? Do they have ads? I use Firefox/Adblock, so I don’t see any.
In any case, I like Bloglines and I’m very comfortable with it. NewsGator may be better, but it’s not worth my time to find out.
J-Walk, you really don’t think it’s that bad? I fought my way into the exceedingly active Bloglines forum last week to make this post:
http://forum.bloglines.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/3221022/m/238102419
So far, no one has responded to it (in fact, unless the hit counter is broken, no one has even read it), but I suspect that’s because the location of that forum is more secret than the location of sleeper cells in American cities.
I’m not even sure if Bloglines itself knows where it is.
Not too many days after that post, “bursts” of back-messages came flooding in to several of my feeds, and I welcomed them back to life, but there are probably others down for the count now that I haven’t noticed yet.
As for Newsgator, I tried it out again a week ago. The interface and configuration of it certainly could use a redesign (some things are almost as hidden as the Bloglines forum), and it is missing some Bloglines features.
One that I noticed right away was the ability to have both all the messages in a feed that you click into marked as read automatically, but at the same time be able to mark one or more of them as unread. This comes in very handy, and I think Newsgator has it in the queue for a future upgrade, but it’s not there yet.
I think you are being harsh! You are right, they did screw up especially by not communicating. But hey, they are now doing what you asked – and berated – them for, and you still nail them for respondng correctly! Move on a little Ed!
I tried Newsgator on your recommendation and found it decidely lacking compared to Bloglines. I also tried the Google service which is diabolically bad. Newsgator is still difficult and cumbersome to use.
Encourage Bloglines to get it right, and encourage them to continue the new style of communication that you asked for.
They are now doing what I asked? Publishing an announcement that repeats what they were saying four months ago? I’ll believe it when they actually do it. And it would help if they would respond to my e-mails.
Bloglines has some features that I can’t find in Newsgator online:
Headline view with collapsable/expandable articles, per feed choice of headline or full article, mark individual articles as unread and mark all articls in a feed unread.
I use every one of these features every day. To be honest – the only problem I’ve even noticed with Bloglines is that some feeds don’t update right away. I have enough feeds that it isn’t a huge deal for me.
Carl, you understate the problem. You’re not noticing it, but some of the feeds don’t update for several days to weeks, and on occasion, permanently. It’s easy to miss this if it’s not a feed you have in mind to read, since Bloglines has an option to not show feeds that have no new posts, which I imagine most people use. Out of sight, out of mind.
We’re not even talking about the “takes a few extra hours to update” problem, since I don’t think that’s a problem (with Bloglines), it’s just the way they operate.
Excellent:
Bloglines will have a planned outage on Monday, December 19, 2005 in order to relocate to a new data center. Here’s our planned schedule for tomorrow:
-2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC): Your subscriptions will stop updating with new items.
-4:00pm PDT (12:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be completely offline. During this time you will not be able to access your account.
-8:00pm PDT (4:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be back online by this time. New articles posted during the outage will appear in your account.
We look forward to vastly improved hardware capacity and tons of elbow room for growth. Thank you for your patience during this outage.
The Bloglines Team
A new variation on the plumber:
Well after being down for the move, the new improved Bloglines is MUCH better than before. My feeds are updating within the hour (I have a 1 hour refresh cycle) and moveing from feed to feed is fast.
It only took them forever but at least they got it right this time. Hopefully it stays this way!
RBuike, after giving it an extra day, I agree that the feeds are updating as one would expect now, and the site does seem snappier (though there are still inevitable lags now and again).
Now they can set on fixing some of the bugs, like the unread count being out to lunch on some feeds (e.g. it says 1 and you click into it and there are 18).