βloglines continues to decline

βloglines is unfortunately continuing what appears to be a rather sad decline. Two of the people that I follow on Twitter have expressed considerable irritation that it's not updating properly. Bloglines made a couple of very unfortunate changes to the beta interface recently - it was very difficult to tell the difference between read and unread posts, and links to the original postings were not working. While the link issue has been addressed it's still very hard to see the difference between two close shades of grey. I gave it a couple of weeks and then I walked away out of frustration, and it looks as though more people are doing the same.

I did a quick check to see what people were saying in their blogs and sample comments are
"lately there have been more and more problems, and the past two days, it's been completely dead slow".
"Bloglines just frustrates me."
"Bloglines has been having some serious problems. Often I’ll open it up and none of my feeds in the left sidebar will show. I’ve contacted Bloglines about this but haven’t received a response."

Up until now I've used Bloglines when I've been teaching RSS and encouraged people to use their service, but I'm seriously thinking of calling time on it completely. It'll be a shame, because I've really enjoyed using it over the years and have found it elegant and fun to use, but if it can't do the job it's a hinderence, not a help.

Comments

[AJ Cann]

Sad but true. And yet, for reasons I can't fully comprehend, I don't like Google Reader, although it works well, so I'm now looking for a web-based RSS reader to replace Bloglines (no desktop clients please).

[Heather Bailie]

I use Google reader as a gadget on my iGoogle page. I think it is fantastic, especially as having it on the iGoogle page makes it very quick and easy to read new material.

[Jo Alcock]

I was a keen user of Bloglines and blogged in the past about how great it was. I've encouraged a number of people to use it over the past years or so too.

However a few weeks ago I took the plunge and went back to Google Reader. I just wasn't happy with the changes with Bloglines plus Google Reader has Trends which are very interesting - I'm trying to make sure I'm only subscribing to things I actually read. The iPhone version of Google Reader is also much better than the Bloglines version and the ability to share and star things is great - in Bloglines I always found saving a bit flaky. It is a shame, but I'm finding Google Reader far better than Bloglines at the moment. One of the great things with OPML is it's so easy to change.

[James Castle]

I had a problem this week with Bloglines not pulling in my Google Alert feeds, so I switched to NewsGator's free online service and they seem to be working fine through that.