Has Bloglines dropped the ball?
I've written a few times now about being disappointed with Bloglines this year - and their lack of progress since they got bought by Ask Jeeves. Now Russell Beattie has come out and said it too - and he got a response from Bloglines chief Mark Fletcher in the comments. Mark said (excerpted):
"You’re right in that we haven’t been rolling out new features recently. We’ve been working hard on the back-end of the system. Every metric in the system (# feeds, # articles, page views, etc) has more than doubled recently. Keeping up with that growth is challenging to anybody. I’m very happy to say that we’re actually crawling feeds more quickly and consistently now than we have in many months. Is it perfect yet? No, but we’re definitely getting there, and of course we’re not done yet. [...] As I hope you’ll agree, focusing on scaling the system instead of new features is the correct strategy. That doesn’t mean you’ll never see a new feature again. We’ll continue to out small improvements as well until we complete the scaling work; next week, for example, we’ll be adding horoscopes and lottery feeds to the system. We’re also working on improving the UI and we have a great AJAX designer on the team now."
While I have no issue with Bloglines focusing on the backend, the lack of new functionality and features does leave them vulnerable to losing a lot of their core readers and champions. They're already no longer the market darling amongst bloggers. For example I've now switched to Rojo and am pretty much championing them now, rather than Bloglines (although I still have a picture of me wearing a Bloglines tee-shirt on my About page!). And if you look at the comments in Russ' post, you'll see there are other people who have become just as frustrated with Bloglines' lack of progress.
The thing is, Mark Fletcher promised new functionality and features months ago. This is what Mark wrote in my own blog comments in May 2005:
"...we have a number a projects underway here at Bloglines to improve the user experience. It's actually our number one priority. Not just new features like package tracking, which was recently rolled out, or weather forecasts, which will be rolled out next week. But improvements to the UI and better ways of dealing with information overload."
Is it just that the UI experience is no longer number 1 priority and scaling the system has become top priority instead? I suppose you can't argue with that - the system needs to be stable and meeting demand. But I really think they need to hurry up and implement some 2005-era UI functionality. It should've been done at least 6 months ago and they're not doing themselves any favors by letting Rojo, Newsgator Online, Start.com and all the other web-based RSS Aggregators overtake them in functionality.
Bloglines still dominates the market and ease-of-use remains their trump card, but how long can they ride that wave? It's frankly amazing I care enough to even write this - so it's obvious I still have some affection for Bloglines the product. It's just sad to see a product that was first to market by a long shot, fail to keep the momentum up as soon as they get bought out.
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It's nice to see them worry about scaling, but I also like to believe that the group working on the UI isn't the same group worrying about the backend and therefore I see no excuse as to why the site still has to look the way it does.
In this environment if you can't keep up you deserve to lose your position, plain and simple. Even just adding little enhancements goes a long way.
This is precisely why I moved to Rojo. Being able to tag feeds and posts has been a key feature to me since it allows me to categorize feeds in multiple ways, something that you can't do in a folder metaphor. Plus, Rojo has kept rolling out new features and UI improvements. On the other hand, Rojo has suffered from backend issues as they've grown. The performance seems to have finally stabilized.
I'd switch from Bloglines, too, if NetNewsWire was able to synchronize with any other online reader. I like the convenience of Bloglines from my work PC and from anywhere else, but at home on my Mac I really prefer NNW. I'd go crazy if I couldn't keep track of what I'd already read at work via BL once I got home to fire up NNW. It's a great feature.
Scrivs, I agree - especially since one of the reasons for the Ask Jeeves acquisition was the increased resources Bloglines would be able to call upon. Well, hello? Why is Ask Jeeves not putting more effort into upgrading Bloglines?
Rick, that's a good point about Rojo's backend problems, which they have mostly sorted out now. For a few months, the only reason I didn't move from Bloglines to Rojo was Rojo's growing pains at the backend. Once they sorted that out, there was no reason to stay at Bloglines.
If only Rojo was as fast UI wise as Bloglines. Maybe it is for someone on a fast connection but down here on the southern tip of Africa Bloglines is a cheetah to Rojo's hoary warthog. Otherwise Rojo is walking all over Bloglines.
Another important area that Bloglines is failing in is keeping up to date with crawling feeds. Some important feeds to me are being updated a whole day late.
I kept with bloglines for a long while because I needed a web-based solution. As such, I've dropped bloglines like a bad habit and I'm currently beta testing searchfox. http://rss.searchfox.com it rocks my face off.
Although their UI leaves much to be desired, one nice thing about bloglines when compared to other online readers is that they have an API.
I've been thinking of switching from Bloglines to Rojo for a while now. I think this might be a good time to do it.
Trying out Rojo now based on your recommendation, Richard. The UI does beat the pants off of Bloglines, but I'm not a fan of having to click "Mark as Read" on each feed after I read it - its an extra step (and click) I don't need.
I've been using Findory's blog reader - http://findory.com/s/ - as my online aggregator recently. I still keep a desktop based aggregator going (RssBandit).
I tried rojo based on this and about 30 seconds later was back to bloglines. I understand tagging URLs and photos but blog entries? no thanks. rojo is very slow. the pagination is a waste of my time. Not automatically marking as read is a pain. Bloglines just gets the job done, it's fast and reliable and i will take that over fancy ajax reveals and tagalicious nosense any day.
It's hard to express enough that, as Bloglines owners and users, we hear you about the need to evolve the product in a timely fashion. The obvious improvements to Bloglines will get done, and Mark and his team have plenty of novel creations up their sleeves as well. We're all on the same page there.
In the meantime, I think you're still hard-pressed to find an aggregator that measures up to Bloglines overall, as some people above have noted, and as evidenced by the one scaling "issue" that Mark neglected to mention: The number of Bloglines users has more than doubled in the past 6 months as well.
Jim Lanzone
Hi Jim,
For the way I use an aggregator, I _am_ hard pressed to find one that's better than bloglines. However, that does not mean that I am satisfied with it: it's just better than alternatives. I've tried Rojo and like some of it's features. I'm currently trying searchfox and like some things it does well too. Just don't get complacent. If bloglines doesn't innovate it will be left behind. Probably the biggest benefit stopping me from switching to others is the simple interface. I know it's hard to maintain simplicity while adding features, but before long the benefits of the features in other readers will outweigh the simplicity of bloglines and I'll switch.
And rojo/searchfox developers: if you're listenning, the manual 'mark as read' is is a big turn-off for me.
Joseph - We agree with you. But again, with finite resources, you can't do everything at once, and Mark explained what the priorities were this summer. With the growth Bloglines has faced (thankfully), we needed to lay a better foundation for the present and future.
We're coming out of that period, however, so now's a good time to let us know what features you want us to add to make Bloglines better and easier.
Whoever wants to post their Top 5 list for Bloglines here, we're all ears.
Jim
Jim,
OK, but it's been a year at least since the unser interface or user visible feature set changed in any significant way. In the meantime, tagging has taken off, Ajax interface improvements are raising people's expectations - and the last improvement I saw was package tracking. PACKAGE TRACKING? C'mon, folks - that's not useful as a feed to anyone but people who ship a ton of things. Also, as mentioned above... are the developers working on the backend improvements the same people who would do front end work? If not, then the scarce resources argument doesn't really hold up...
Jim,
I also switched to Rojo, after experiencing Bloglines support desinterest in solving a problem with a certain feed.
Rojo isn't perfect and surely has some quirks but at least i get a response from support, when i write them a mail.
I wrote a lot of mails to support to fix a small problem. After having waited for weeks for a reply, the problem is still not fixed and so far i haven't heard from support again. So tell me, why should i give you input, when it is obvious that you want to add new features but aren't interested or capable to make the old ones work?
To be fair, these support issues can be experienced not only from Bloglines. Technorat and Furl eg. also don't care or respond to mails.
Bloglines has been the centre of my web experience for a while now, but I am looking off for other solutions EVERYDAY, so my list of improvements are 3 pains that blogline needs to fix, one pain from old school internet that bloglines could help fix, and then finally a bit of a mashup that bloglines needs to consider to keep at the centre of the web in the long term.
1. get the site to work properly in the standard Nokia 'services' browser.
2. fix the 'don't let this disappear, I haven't read it yet' option
3. if it hasn't been in front of my eyes on the screen yet, don't tick it off as read.
4. make it easy for me to check my old school plain jane five year old will never ever have rss etc. pop mail account via bloglines
5. if I want, let me tag to del.icio.us, directly under a post, while reading. No clip this, clip that, blog here and there. Del.icio.us is the answer to the age old problem of 'I read it in bloglines, but now I can not find it again'. Ignore this integration at your peril, aggregators are a commodity, but the place where I 'remember' my stuff only exists at once spot in the entire interwebiverse (so no, don't try and compete with your own tagging - too late)
Here's a couple of feature (or is it two?) I'd like:
I read a number of feeds that are behind a firewall. I'd like to be able to read them using the same UI, even though BL can't crawl them.
Some of these feeds are also protected using a cookie-based authentication scheme. So the only way to really consume them is via a browser..
So, browser-side RSS reading, within the same UI, with support for subscription/article tracking just like the crawled feeds would be great.
I tried Rojo and found it tobe very slow and not structured the way I wanted it to be. The UI is better than Bloglines's which is clunky and very hard to navigate.
I do not think that having lottery and horoscope feeds is a big plus. In fact I think it is a big waste of time : fixing the ugly UI is way more important than that.
Ultimately what I'd really like is something that had better filtering so that I don;t keep seeing the same things over and over again. Not really practical for anything other than a local reader though I would say.
What I'd really like to see is a web-based aggregator that looks and feels just like my desktop aggregator: 3 panes, preferences, dialogs, keyboard navigation, hierarchical folders, and SPEED. Build NetNewsWire/FeedDemon as a web app, and I'd be a customer for life. (I'm not saying this is what most people want, just what I want. :)
Just about every news aggregator still seems itchy and primitive to me. (Itchy, in the sense that it doesn't scratch mine and I'm still compelled to write my own.)
Over the past few years, I've really been wishing for more intelligence in feed readers:
http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/AmphetaOutlinesWishList
http://decafbad.com/blog/2004/06/14/
info-freako-or-whos-already-past-arguing-about-syndication-formats
I want news readers to watch what I do, and try to learn from my behavior. Suggest / highlight items to my liking, attempt to help prioritize my feed list. Of course, I'm an info freako, and I'm up to around 700 feeds in my aggregator, so my needs are a bit different than the majority.
Keep it coming guys. Some of these are already on the list, some are new. Good stuff.
And btw, if anyone knows any good engineers who want to work for Bloglines, there are job postings on the Bloglines site. :)
Thanks
I'd like to be able to mark some as favorites so I could just show them if I don't have much time. I'd like to be able to categorize feeds in more than one place. To tag feeds. I think someone already said this, but mark something keep without it necessarily showing up as new (so it's there, but you don't keep getting disappointed when you see there's a new item).... better integrated search -- like a way to find who links to or cites a post without using greasemonkey ...
1. tag feeds
2. direct to delicious, not just clipping
3. Fix editing/feed organization. drag and drop to folders/tags, no clicking of check boxes.
4. edit subscription urls. I hate having to delete, then re-add because someone changed their feed url.
5. More time options for history. There can be a lot of posts between "month" and "all posts".
6. Maybe an online bug tracker? Sometimes certain feeds don't show pics in a post in bloglines, or relative links are prepended with www.bloglines.com. I'd like to file those with you, so they can be fixed.
7. Undo. No idea how to implement this, but sometimes I click a feed, and I don't get to finish reading all the articles, or my browser crashes. Maybe a "Between last 2 reads" history option?
Bloglines Search: Please fix that. I never got any useful results from search.
As someone who is a dedicated BL user and who spends 50% of my time away from my PC, I'd love to have a mobile version that worked.
I wish that Bloglines would partner with a mobile RSS reader like a FreeNews or Headlineor a Litefeeds and offer a true mobile RSS experience. Yes, I have tried Bloglines WAP version and others, but like all WAP services everywhere, the experience was horrible. Just painfully slow, and terrible navigation--there is no way you can give it a Bush-like spin to make it better
These client-server set-ups have a much faster (almost real time) experience, you can access a 100 feeds (do that on WAP Bloglines? Nope, don't think so), and the UIs and functionality are already in place, at least on the ones I've tried.
Jim, have you considered opening your APIs so that these companies can build and market mobile versions of your UI? Are you talking to these folks? I'd recommend that you check them out.
- get the basics right - stable and reliable feed reading - don't drop posts, don't not update for ages, don't repeat posts, etc
- auto feed maintenance - if rss feed url changes, the services tracks for the new feed source and maintains my subscription
- once I have read a post, get rid of it, I don't want clutter in my aggregator - let me post to del.icio.us, my blog, my software note collector (EverNote), etc, but then delete as I go
- develop some cool tools for finetuning my opml file
- if a subscribed to feed does not have any new postings for a set period of time, ask me if I want to remain subscribed, or let me toggle on an automatic delete option - there is so much info out there sometimes it is necessary to be brutal to keep things streamlined and efficient
- come up with some really cool way of managing the service if away from computer for extended period - holiday/sickness. Maybe some edited highlights option, or somehow introduce some kind of community/peer review of what are the key posts of each week - kind of like the current Top Links feed.
- make better use of the info about who subscribes to the same feeds as me to help uncover new sources. For example - if another user is subscribed to say at least 5 of the same feeds as me, monitor their new subscriptions and if they start looking at a new feed with interesting content automatically subscribe me to that feed, odds on I am likely to be interested in it. There could be dedicated folder for this that I can monitor/review. This would have to be done very well to avoid a rapid generation of irrelevant feeds.
- update of the UI. I am really liking the netvibes site at the moment. Especially the integration of email reading, websearch and listening to audio. I also like the links/bookmarking bit of Protopage. Make the aggregator a swiss army knife multi tool dashboard for the web
Thanks
My number-one request for Bloglines is built-in filtering: positive (include this only) and negative (remove this) search terms that will be applied feed-by-feed or globally.
This would also be great for Bloglines itself: instead of tracking all the customized newsfeeds people create via Feedster, the RandomChaos RSS Filter, and others, Bloglines will only have to ping the main feeds and then display posts based on user settings.
And tags for feeds/posts could be cool, too. In terms of putting Bloglines items directly into del.icio.us, there's already a Greasemonkey user script that does that (it changes "Clip/Blog This" into "post to del.icio.us"): http://persistent.info/archives/2005/02/13/bloglines-del.icio.us
Sorry but had one last thought -
I am baffled about what the business model is for feed agregator like Bloglines. Mr Jeeves obviously paid good money for the service as they saw some means of getting a return from it. How? Is this what all the horoscope/lottery/package tracking nonsence is about? Or is advertising where things are headed. If so, I am not actually all that against ads, as long as they are well identified as being ads, and not masquerading as some kind of fake blog post or something.
In fact I would actually welcome an automatically generated and subscribed to feed of adverts which are based on the content of the feeds I subscribe to - sort of like Google ads. Even better would be a tie in with ebay.
There are plenty of options for the business model, but we're just focused on building the user base right now. As I said above, it has more than doubled since we acquired Bloglines, and we want to continue to help more people learn about this great way to manage information.
One of the best things about Bloglines is that you can use it to track virtually anything, of course, not just blogs or news. Mark has always called Bloglines the "homepage of the 21st century". Besides blogs and news feeds, you can track things like Craig's List classifieds, or even open your own Bloglines email accounts and have them come into your MyFeeds page. Package tracking, weather, horoscopes, etc are just more examples of things people want to track. Now with IAC we have a whole family of things you can potentially track, from tickets/bands to Evites to mortgate rate changes. Stay tuned for that. (I think eBay would be a great partner too but when we inquired with them earlier this year they didn't jump at it.)
Anyway, we agree there are more important things than eBay feeds or package tracking. All your ideas have been fantastic. Thanks so much.
By the way, Ralph I checked with customer service and they walked me through your situation. Sounds like the only outstanding issue was one they pointed out about your feed, so the ball was in your court to fix. If you are still having trouble please email them again. Marie is standing by.
I'm using Bloglines for some time now and I think that it's got a nice, clean interface. It offers the most important features and especially one feature that's not available in Rojo: a mobile access page. It's great to read and clip posts on your mobile phone on your way from or to work. I couldn't live without it :-)
1. Search within my feeds.
2. Tagging and then displaying of tagged feeds.
3. Better feed management.
4. "Prettier" interface (without loosing speed).
5. Delicious/BlinkList post interface.
I've put my five ways to improve web based aggregators (not specific to Bloglines or Rojo) up at my site...here are the points, in no particular order:
(1) Better Feed Management
(2) Multiple Criteria to Display Feeds
(3) Different Feed Views
(4) Easier Feed Subscription
(5) Keep Track of What I Read
story rating....
if like tivo they had thumbs up thumbs down rating we could get recommendations on stories (I really don't care about feeds, a lot repeat eachother)
Maybe this is a problem at my end, but if I click through to a post, read it, then click back to BL, all my unread posts in the feed/folder I'm reading have disappeared, and I have to use the 'display all in the last x hours' to get them back - which also brings back all the posts I have already read. Very frustrating having to open every post in a new tab/window.
If I tick a post to read later, I'd like it to appear in the folder when I open it up again. At the moment, posts older than a few days are disappearing, and again I have to use 'display all' to get 'em back.
Other than that, I like BL, I use it daily and it meets my needs.
1. Tags
2. Full text search
3. Post to del.icio.us, digg, Simpy, ...
4. Post to (multiple) blogs
5. Send per Mail (with address book)
6. Share entries (with rules!) with contacts
7. Keyword subscription
8. Include in Blogs (with rules!)
9. Email subscription (like in Bloglines)
10. Email notification (with rules!)
Jim, in case you want to discuss the support matter any further (it's rather technical), you could write me a mail...