Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Bloglines sucks

Re: Bloglines sucks

jenett — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:24:20 -0000

Bloglines may or may not suck, but their support stinks bigtime (see my 'website' link).

Re: Bloglines sucks

DarkAvenue — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 02:16:39 -0000

Let me join the growing concensus, Scoble:

Scobleizer sucks

Hey, Scobleizer, I don’t really care who’s problem it is, but it seems more and more posts sound as if the blogger was an incompetent, overhyped perfson. It works just fine with smart people, and doesn’t work with you. So, the only conclusion I’m going to come to: Scobleizer sucks. Please fix before everyone switches to reading books.

UPDATE: Apparently, it was a bug in Wordpress, their snakiness filter was down. They are working on fixing it. Sorry for the stink, but I needed to force the issue because I was losing IQ points over on Scobleizer.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Andrew — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:24:27 -0000

Old New Thing is making fun of you, sir: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldne...

Re: Bloglines sucks

Andrew — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:09:26 -0000

So you feel justified in causing Bloglines to lose users for something that's Wordpress's fault just to keep yourself from losing readers?

Re: Bloglines sucks

Amy — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:40:22 -0000

Odd.. I've never had an issue with reading your blog with bloglines.. :)

Re: Bloglines sucks

len20 — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:13:42 -0000

ouch.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Luc Phelps — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:21:03 -0000

SHAME ON YOU Robert Scoble. You're juvenile, irresponsible, completely self-centered and, what's perhaps the most pathetic: you've shown you know jack about technology.

JUVENILE:
It's simply brat-ish to insult someone simply because they're having a technical issue.

IRRESPONSIBLE:
Not only did you not verify that the issue was due to Bloglines, you actually use a nasty post title, which is rather vile for a number of reasons:

1/ considering the impact your blog posts have (at least until you ruin your reputation by repeating such actions)

2/ given how blog posts show up in various readers and all around the Net, most people are never going to see anything more than the title.

SELF-CENTERED:
So it turns out that it's not Blogline's fault. OK - everyone is entitled to a mistake or a hissy-fit like yours. That's when you should APOLOGIZE and try to rectify the harm you've done. Instead what do we get:

"Sorry for the stink, but I needed to force the issue because I was losing readers over on Bloglines."

A half-baked 4 word apology which took you less time to write than the actual post AND not only do you seek to justify yourself, you want us to feel like you're the one who suffered the hardship of losing readers. BFD as though readers are going to volitize simply because they couldn't get your feed for a moment.

YOU'RE A TECH WRITER?! LOL
The irony of it all is that as someone who is supposed to know something about new media technology, in condemning Bloglines with the reasoning of 'my feeds work in GR and they don't in Bloglines, therefore Bloglines is at fault' you've shown that you understand very little about how software and web services operate.

The worst of it is that you're one of the most (if not the most) widely-read individual blogger, and what you've done here is given blogging a bad name by showing so little responsibility in publishing a rash, false and damaging post AND without even a proper apology or retraction after the fact.

And you're worried about losing a few readers because of a technical glitch?!? I'd be far more worried about losing readers over this kind of juvenile behavior and demonstration over how little you've mastered the technology you write about.

Note:
I'm a Google Reader user and I've never used any other reader because GR has worked wonderfully for me so far.

Re: Bloglines sucks

bytehead — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:04:33 -0000

Looking back, no wonder I've set some blogs to ignore updates this week. I already had you "ignored". ;-) Have no clue as to why. So it wasn't a biggie for me anyway.

I'm just surprised at the number of Bloglines readers there are. The 200 limit should also be a limit for Beta Bloglines, as that's the limit in the backend. I don't run into that as a problem except for my torrent feeds, which have become pretty much useless at this point regardless of reader. Just way too much to go through and weed out what I may want.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Stoicho — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:04:43 -0000

I am using Bloglines and it is the best reader. Google reader UI - just dont like it, but I don't do iPhone or Facebook, so I guess I can't be trusted.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Andy — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:48:05 -0000

Sorry everyone, we were working on some new stats features and the Bloglines effect was unforseen. We just fixed it by removing the element that caused Bloglines subscribers to see unchanged posts appear as updated items.

Re: Bloglines sucks

bytehead — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:29:15 -0000

Google Reader doesn't just work for me. Yes, I've tried it, when Bloglines fell off and stopped updating one weekend. It imported my OPML file just fine, but trying to get caught back up when you're reading 1000 feeds is a bitch. Especially when you think that you're almost done reading a folder and Google then proceeds to keep scrolling more new stuff at you. No demarcation of when I've stopped reading on one feed and started another. No real numbers, just 100+ or 1000+. No (obvious) way of collapsing feeds, and no (obvious) way to mark a folder read. Stuff that I scrolled by that was still marked as new (which was the most frustrating). Hell, I don't even like the beta Bloglines. Go figure. And I get updates on articles on those feeds that I want.

I can understand the frustration. You just choose the wrong target.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Robert Scoble — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 04:39:22 -0000

Monk: I just wish they had taken care of the problem when I emailed Matt last week. I don't know how many readers I lost because of this.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Monk — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 04:16:38 -0000

Awesome job, Robert.

You've got both Bloglines and Wordpress.com alerted and their representatives commented here. Just awesome. :)

Re: Bloglines sucks

Matt Mullenweg — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 04:00:07 -0000

Robert, Paul Querna at Bloglines pointed out a bug in how we're doing stats tracking in the feed that's causing this problem. We're getting it fixed up on the WordPress.com-side right away. It was a problem we introduced, not Bloglines, who's just working as they have for years now.

Re: Bloglines sucks

op — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 01:31:01 -0000

Not really. Bloglines have been my favorite for long( since 2003). Its far better than all even netvibes, which I feel more geeky than google-reader. There are many bloglines features that are yet to come to google-reader or netvibes.

Re: Bloglines sucks

askpaul — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:54:55 -0000

@scoble: Reply in blog post form:
http://journal.paul.querna....

@David Scott Lewis: Try the Bloglines Beta, at http://beta.bloglines.com/ It removes the 200 item limit, and adds many other features.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Tim — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:37:07 -0000

Bloglines interface is so much better then Google Reader. My stats show Bloglines holds about a 30% share of RSS readers, compared to 50% by Google. I rarely get duplicate RSS issues but they have crept more and more lately. Still I'm staying with bloglines b/c of the interface.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Jud — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:36:30 -0000

That's a fairly juvenile post. Have you ever contacted them to figure out why it keeps happening?

Re: Bloglines sucks

Erica — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:20:51 -0000

It seemed to start for me on Bloglines at the same time that you added (or Wordpress added) the dynamic comment thing into your RSS feed. Although I don't see that any more in your feed, and it's still doing it. Yeah, it's annoying. :s

Re: Bloglines sucks

Ray Ebersole — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:07:55 -0000

I had no problem adding your feed to Bloglines beta. I use both Google Reader and bloglines, one for work and one for home/personal use.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Jake — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:05:27 -0000

I know when I tried Bloglines for a few days, I kept having this with Chris Prillo's feed and your feed. I just got fed up with it and went back to the good one.

Re: Bloglines sucks

David Scott Lewis — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:26:35 -0000

I agree with Marshall.

Under their new leadership, they're doing their best to reclaim users they've lost to Google Reader (my assumption, which is probably correct, is that most of the readers they've lost have likely switched to Google Reader, but this assumption may indeed not be true).

And, two things Marshall didn't mention, probably because they're not new advantages for Bloglines, is the option to receive e-newsletters along with your RSS feeds and the ability to create a RSS feed that is a search within your feeds. I use both features and they're EXTREMELY handy.

I scan a couple of hundred feeds in my desktop reader, Omea Pro. It's a FANTASTIC reader, better than anything I've seen and I've tried at least two dozen. Free, too. But for several hundred other feeds, I've done two things. First, I've run a keywords/phrases search within the feeds and then created a RSS feed for updated search results. And I do this within my Bloglines account since my Google Reader account can't do this. Second, I put the several hundred feeds through a FeedHub account and then filter a little bit by source priority, but mostly my memes. This means I can catch items that interest me that appear in feeds that I simply don't have time to scan. Matter of fact, the results have often led me to adjust which feeds I regularly scan. (This second point is NOT an advantage for Bloglines over Google Reader; it's just something that I do. It so happens that it's a Bloglines OPML that I've inputted into a FeedHub account.)

Anyway, Bloglines isn't useless just yet -- and it's a good thing that Google Reader has competition. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of good alternatives. As much as I like Omea Pro -- and it really is fantastic -- it has no market share or mindshare. NewsGator is the only desktop reader with any significant mindshare, and it's mindshare is insignificant compared to Bloglines and Google Reader.

BTW, since the Bloglines folks are likely going to read this, I do have one major complaint with Bloglines. To Bloglines: Do NOT limit a feed to the last 200 items. Do NOT place any upper limit on the number of items for a feed or e-newsletter. This is my biggest complaint about Bloglines. And it seems like they're pretty silly to place a limit. Perhaps you can display up to the last 200 items as a maximum for a single page of output, but ALL results should be accessible and searchable.

One more thing (to Bloglines): The search engine is pretty awful. You need a better search engine. Are you using Ask? If so, scrap it. If not, at least give it a try.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 18:41:08 -0000

Fwiw, Google Reader doesn't scale well over 1k feeds and Bloglines is publicly moving to support protocols like OpenID and APML. The way that Ask.com blogsearch leverages Bloglines subscriber numbers to fight spam is another thing Google Reader could learn from. I don't use Bloglines myself (I use Newsgator's NNW on the desktop) but I'm just saying, total Google Reader triumphalism isn't warranted imho.

Re: Bloglines sucks

Daniel Goldman — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 18:23:11 -0000

Robert,

I was having this issue with your feed on Bloglines too. It was quite annoying. At first, I thought of contacting you by email, but figured it will get lost in your inbox with the many other emails you get.

It makes me wonder whether Bloglines reads their support forums. I (and apparently others) have been having an issue with my feed; I posted about it in their official forum, but have yet to get a response.

I tried using Google Reader in the past, however, I really like the font size and color of Bloglines over Google Reader. I find it much easier to scan through all my 200+ feeds.

Re: Bloglines sucks

JohnAtkinson — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 17:54:03 -0000

Since the topic is newsreaders, I hope this won't be taken as "advertising"...

Another option is to use PimpMyNews (http://www.PimpMynews.com) which is a new "talking newsreader" that lets you listen to your news and blogs online, or on-the-go on your iPod or iPhone (or other MP3 players).

Robert's feed works fine on PimpMyNews. It also comes pre-loaded with 1,000+ other feeds.