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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