Whatz up with bloglines?

[Taro Toporific]

Perhaps the largest online RSS reader bloglines has gone boggedlines for the past 30 hours! Grrr.

[Marked Trail]

bloglines has gone boggedlines for the past 30 hours! Grrr.

[SIZE="5"]Welcome to Zombo.com.[/SIZE]



Also see today's TechCrunch: Did Someone Finally Pull The Plug On Bloglines Or Is It Just Having A Bad Day?

[Coligny]

Perhaps the largest online RSS reader bloglines has gone boggedlines for the past 30 hours! Grrr.

Is it back ? is it anygood when it works ? better than google reader ?

Because I have daily around 4000 items in my... unknown number of feed... and I can't see this online option thingy being fast enough to be of any use...

[Mike Oxlong]

It was back up yesterday. I promptly exported my rss feeds to a file on my drive, so I can either use another online service when brogrines goes down for good, or download something like newsgator.

[Taro Toporific]

It was back up yesterday. I promptly exported my rss feeds to a file on my drive, so I can either use another online service when brogrines goes down for good...

Thanks for that reminder exporting RSS feeds---The Bloglines "Export" button is hidden waaaay down at the bottom of the RSS list, which is sort of invisible on my browser.

Why Bloglines? For me Bloglines has the a cleaner interface compared to Goggle Reader that everyone now uses. However, I have been using Goggle Reader for a day now and it does update the RSS feeds faster than Bloglines. However, Goggle Reader uses some vile JAVA code in the background (probably to snoop on the Reader habits, grrr) that slows down its responsiveness on my wimpy 450Mhz netbook, and for whatever reason, Bloglines runs twice as fast than GoogleReader.

[Mike Oxlong]

And down again...

[Taro Toporific]

And down again...

And now it us back up!

I beginning to enjoy the drama of bloglines insiders in their unofficial site: http://twitter.com/bloglines

[FG Lurker]

I didn't start using RSS feeds until I bought an iPhone. The Byline app combines perfectly with Google Reader, and with my jailbroken iPhone I can run Byline in the background* so it keeps the feeds up to date. When I get on a train (or just have a few minutes to kill) everything is ready to go, all feeds and even all the full article web pages are cached and ready for reading. Highly recommended!

* The only catch is the regular data access does tend to drain the battery quite a bit faster than normal. If I am going to be away from power for a full day I tend to close Byline down.

[Mulboyne]

I've never used RSS feeds. What are the main advantages as far as regular users are concerned?

[Coligny]

I've never used RSS feeds. What are the main advantages as far as regular users are concerned?

Instant access to all updates of website you follow daily, you check the list of headlines and just go there if there is sumthing interesting. Essential for forums (well, except fooked gaijin where it's not working).
Even better when there is no updates, you don't need to go to the site to see there is nothing new... I have 104 feeds these days... would not be able to follow so much by hand....

[FG Lurker]

Even better when there is no updates, you don't need to go to the site to see there is nothing new...

This is something I have found to be very useful for sites (blogs for example) that don't get updated regularly but are interesting when they do. I drop the site's RSS feed into Google Reader and when the once-a-month update happens I find out about it right away. No extra effort to check, and no missed bits of information.

[Taro Toporific]

WTFBBQ!
First Bloglines dies and today not a single one of my 200+ feeds on Google Reader has been updated while I was sleeping the past 7 hours.

[Marked Trail]

... today not a single one of my 200+ feeds on Google Reader has been updated while I was sleeping the past 7 hours.

Dude, take a break. It was MAY DAY in the Real World (not May 2 like in Japan).

[FG Lurker]

I've never used RSS feeds. What are the main advantages as far as regular users are concerned?

I just came across a very good reason to use RSS to keep up with sites you visit regularly. (I'm sure this isn't news to many regular RSS users but for an RSS n00b like me it was a first.)

I was looking for a specific article that I wanted to go back and review. I knew the basic content but for the life of me I couldn't remember which site I had seen it on. This isn't the first time this has happened to me, I'm sure others have had the same experience. At times like this, a quick dig through Google will often turn up the page, but not always. Sometimes it can take a good chunk of time and frustration to find the desired information. As I had seen the article via an RSS feed though, I was able to go to Google Reader and use the search there to search all articles in my RSS history. Answer came up immediately, first result in the list! Very cool, and a big time saver.

[Mulboyne]

I just came across a very good reason to use RSS to keep up with sites you visit regularly.

That could be useful. Another reason I heard recently which might push me into setting something up is that Japanese sites now increasingly use RSS. (That might, of course, also be a sign that it's coming to the end of its useful life). When I first looked into the idea, I don't think any of the places I regularly visited used it. Consequently, I never got out of the habit of visiting sites directly.

[Mike Oxlong]

Also see today's TechCrunch: Did Someone Finally Pull The Plug On Bloglines Or Is It Just Having A Bad Day?

As you may have heard, we are sorry to share that Bloglines will officially shut down on October 1, 2010.
More detail can be found on the Ask.com blog - http://blog.ask.com.

[Mike Oxlong]

We have some exciting news to share about the Bloglines service!

As you may have heard, Ask.com (http://ask.com/) has entered into an agreement with MerchantCircle (http://www.merchantcircle.com/) who has agreed to keep Bloglines up and running. Stay tuned over the coming months as MerchantCircle works to improve the Bloglines service by creating a richer and more local user experience.

In the near term, your news feeds and access to the service (with your same password) are still available. You can read more detail about MerchantCircle and its plans for the service at the MerchantCircle blog (http://www.merchantcircle.com/blog/) and the Ask.com blog (http://blog.ask.com/)