I’ve been happily using Bloglines basically since the service began. It meets my needs in an RSS reader simply and effectively. And RSS reading is now the center of my online information consumption.
I’ve never had a complaint with Bloglines; sure, it goes down for maintenance for a few hours every now and then, but I don’t mind. It is, after all, a free service. And I’d gladly pay a few bucks for a premium service of some kind if they offered one.
About two weeks ago, Bloglines inexplicably “updated” all 100+ of my feeds: in other words, it lost track of my “unread” posts and told me I’d read everything. This was a minor disaster, since my reading of feeds is somewhat sporadic. I know it wasn’t something I did by accident. The mishap followed a “maintenance downtime.” I assume somehow Bloglines lost the data.
I don’t know how widespread the problem was, but I was miffed. I was even more miffed when I couldn’t find anything on Bloglines itself talking about the problem, other than a few lonesome complaints on some sparsely populated support bulletin boards — complaints that had yet to be answered by Bloglines staff.
Under its founding management, the company had done a good job of maintaining its own blog and staying in touch with its customers. Now? If anyone’s minding the shop, there’s no sign. (The “News” thread in the customer support forum has zero posts!)
I returned today from a weeklong vacation and discovered that Bloglines seemed *yet again* to have lost my “unread post” tallies — at least, I’m reasonably sure that Boing Boing has posted more than 12 times in the last week!
Bloglines is now owned by Ask.com which is owned by Barry Diller’s IAC. Maybe that means it’s now just a small cog in a big faceless corporation. But if there are still people working there who care about their customers, it would be nice to hear something about these ongoing problems. And if it’s just me, or me and a small handful of users, then it would be good to know that too! Otherwise, happy as I’ve been with Bloglines, it will be time to start scouting out alternatives.
If other Bloglines users are finding these problems, or if you’ve seen other posts about this (since I’ve been away and now my feed reader’s busted, maybe I missed them!), let me know. I see Jeremy Zawodny recently complained about the service, though not about this particular problem.
[tags]bloglines, rss, feeds, feed readers[/tags]
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That’s the reason I left bloglines as well. I used to think it was great, and then I gave up on it after it lost my read state of all of my sites. The first time annoyed me, the second time was enough. I switched to NetNewsWire on the Mac synced with NewsGator, and lo and behold, it still happens occasionally.
I haven’t tried Google Reader, but I’m inching closer to giving it a go.
“I haven’t tried Google Reader, but I’m inching closer to giving it a go.”
I’m currently trying Google reader, and so far it seems to be going well. Although it lacks some of the features of desktop readers, it does not require much memory or cpu resources, and has a responsive Ajax GUI. So it may be a good alternative.
I was using Bloglines for over a year, but issues with unsolved security bugs made me look around, and I ended up with Newsgator Online. I pay a small yearly fee and also get a desktop aggregator (FeedDemon), podcast downloader, and mobile access on my Treo (NGO Mobile). It started out being a bit slower than Bloglines, but I’ve go no complaints about the speed now. I was able to export my subs from BL as a OPML file and import into NGO,.
I’ve been around the block with a bunch of readers. Radio Userland back in the day, then Bloglines, then Newsgator. I tried Google Reader shortly after it came out and I haven’t looked back. I’d recommend it unhesitatingly.
I got hit with only a partial loss, but it was still pretty annoying. On the plus side, it did give me the momentum I needed to start paring down the long list of blogs I supposedly read (intend to read one magical day would be a better description).
I’m sticking with bloglines because I’ve been using it as a historical archive as much as anything else and I don’t know yet how I’d get the info stored there out.
Try Google Reader, you will love the simplicity and elegance of it.
I have lost my list in bloglines for several days now and think it is not coming back……..also over the last month or more some of the posts I have read have come back up as being unread….very annoying……..did you stick with bloglines or changes to something else and if so what?………please help……..