How do I know? Because I’m expecting a new article from 24 Ways each morning and I haven’t been seeing them on Bloglines for the past few days. I’m not the only one having problems (via CrunchNotes):
Bloglines seems to be in a general state of decline. Other RSS readers (Rojo, Yahoo, Attensa, BlogBridge, tons more) are innovating and gaining users at Bloglines’ expense. No new features worth mentioning. I hate to see a service I love fade like this.
In October, Richard McManus of Read/WriteWeb described the inability of Bloglines to improve or even keep up a basic level of service. He asks, “Is it just that the UI experience is no longer number 1 priority and scaling the system has become top priority instead?”
Bloglines must be hoping that users aren’t willing to go through the pain of switching. Given there are so many news readers around, I don’t see any point in wasting more time with Bloglines. Plus, trying new apps is a great way to understand what works and what doesn’t on the web.
Feeds are so cool. When I’ve been thinking about how to put my own website together, incorporating feeds of my own or others makes good sense. It’ll mean learning how to interact with RSS and other formats, but how hard could that be?
