RSS reader Bloglines has suffered a major outage over the weekend with the service simply ceasing to update any blogs from just before midnight PST February 24.
Threads on the Bloglines forum suggest that the issue is widespread and to date no statement has been issued by Bloglines or IAC/ Ask staff in relation to the issue. A test at 11pm PST shows the most recent stories indexed by Bloglines are over 15 hours old.
Bloglines users are not happy with the outage, with some already signing up for other services, and other comments including such as “Remember when they at least showed the plumber?”
One commenter claims that Bloglines may be about to be shut down:
A buddy who works at ask.com (owners of Bloglines) says that they are discontinuing the service because it makes no money and there will be an announcement tomorrow.
A shutdown is more than unlikely. But users deserve some attention during an outage of this size.
Bad News for Blogliners..Good News for Deadpool
Duncan this ’scoop’ is another lemon. Their hiring which obviously suggests their not going into the DP over the weekend.
http://www.blog....com/about/jobs
I do believe the job listings have been like that for a while now, if you look at the IAC job listing (follow the link at the bottom of the Bloglines page, where it says “apply online”) you can see that the job was posted September last year!
http://www.askc...ails.aspx?__ID=*9F2F921F592636B2
I do think shutting down is unlikely, but they certainly have a huge support problem. I find it shocking that nobody is watching over it during the weekend – what is the point in being owned by a company like IAC if you’re going to have an uptime report worse than a lot of start-ups? One of the things that stopped me straying away from the big players is that their support and uptime levels might be low, I don’t think they could be worse than this and the numerous times the Plumber has turned up.
-5 points
so I’ve imagined the downtime and those people saying the service is down on the bloglines forums?
generally speaking companies don’t just shut down services. but users are clearly extremely angry.
Yes I think you have.
But I just signed up to the service, and considering its backers I think its a old school service that is probably destine for the dustbin (just not today).
I’ve been a long time Bloglines user for over 2 years now. NOT happy with today’s outage, specially the poor support…
Google Reader gains more market share. But, if Bloglines is getting shutdown, that’s not a good thing. As much as I like Google Reader, it needs competition and, also, if you can’t make money with a feed reader then it won’t encourage competition in this area. Yet another place where Google will end up with monopoly share.
Whether a company is hiring or not is never a reliable test as to whether a company is going to continue operations….most of the banks / lenders that have imploded were actively hiring the day / week they announced their closure…… it’s very common… that being said, I know nothing about bloglines… I’m juuuuust saying…..
bad news for blogliners, but let’s hope there is a light at the end of that tunnel
Life at last, some feeds starting to trickle through.
I just switched my feeds to NewsGator. Enough is enough!
An online service needs to be up and responsive 24×7. Whomever is responsible for this outage and for Bloglines support should be immediately terminated.
You might want to try one of the other 9 RSS readers on this list:
http://seo2.0.o...s-mac-and-linux
I’ve tried 5 web based RSS readers tonight. None of them are as good as Bloglines so far. I haven’t done Google Reader. I have 3 gmail email accounts already and don’t want to tie the RSS reader to any of them, so I would have to create another gmail account. I hope Bloglines comes back.
My engadget feed, that I read on bloglines, says that it was updated Updated: Mon, Feb 25 2008 6:52 AM. But none of the storys are newer than December!
Stop complaining!
It’s a free service that has let me down less times than the WinTel computer I use it on.
Despite their recent hiccup I congratulate Bloglines on a great product.
Could someone from Bloglines/ASK/IAC please comment? I love Beta.Bloglines.com but will move to Google Reader if they have plans to shutdown services.
Has anyone tried using Bloglines Beta? The feeds appear to be up to date when using this version.
Surrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrprizing.
http://yooflix....earchVideo.aspx
I love the fact that i read this article via my online RSS Reader… hehehe (one that isn’t on any of those lists… one that did not stop working last night).
It’s okay Scoble, there is competition in this space, there are young entrepreneurs who are not only willing, but excited, to enter the sandbox. Good times, like the old days… not a huge Google who you sit and wait for what they give you next, but a small team eager to gobble up feedback from users, implement the communities desires/ideas, work with consumers and publishers alike to develop a real genuine rallying point for the burgeoning RSS market. We’ve been developing our product for over a year. (We are just two people, only one of which (me) is involved in programming. So needless to say our product has taken time to develop, and has many exciting areas for growth and improvement… but please look at the “long time”, not as paint drying, but as prime rib cooking… sure, it takes time, but the results tend to be worth it.
Of course I won’t name the service here, of all places*, lol… but just know that there are people hard at work trying to create options and opportunities in the RSS reader space… so you haven’t seen the last of the “pure play” readers. (And of course, who would launch just a lonely old pure-play RSS reader anymore? Not me… hehehe.. so of course it has it’s nuance.)
*M.A. : This is not a statement against your blog, rather the contrary… I mean only to say that there is nothing worse than people who spam the comments of TechCrunch with links to their not-ready-for-prime-time service… Also, I want my comment to stand on it’s own and not be cheapened by a link… that would mean I’m only trying to use these comments as a platform of self promotion, that’s not my bag either. (Not to mention, who want’s their first TecCrunch referrer to be from a comment link, anyway?
)
I Just want people to at least remain optimistic that the pure-play RSS reader scope is definitely being played with by teams that will be offering competition worthy of being called competition…
That is really nothing new, they are up and down all the time.
It’s funny that this rarely gets coverage.
The entire reason I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader last year was because their feed updates dropped out frequently. Maybe not as long as this one, but I would see 6+ hours missing at least 3 times a week, for example, and each time there would be plenty of threads with no response from support.
I’ve been a Bloglines user for over 3 years and love it. I noticed the outage but wasn’t too upset about it, knowing that it’d probably get resolved soon enough. Plus shouldn’t we be doing other things on weekends other than reading feeds?
IAC is having a tough time of it these days so I could see if this doesn’t make money they could sell it off. I love Bloglines though and still think its better than Google Reader, so whatever happens I’d like to see it get more investment than IAC gave it. Obviously the things they are messing up are not rocket science. It’s just a matter of effort. (On the other hand I really don’t think they are down that much.)
Well it came back but some feeds are missing an entire days worth of entries … Bloglines have really screwed themselves this time, and still no word from them – utterly useless twits.
I can’t stand any of the competition products but I’m going to have to get out of Bloglines hell.
I recently got an invite to the preview of feeddo and although it is still early and has a lot of rough edges, it is promising. It is pretty well integrated with both bloglines and google reader.
This is even more annoying than feedburner dropping your subscriber counts ..
how do i switch my feeds en masse from bloglines to someplace else?
This article smells funny to me, like its sour-grapes fueled and has no reliably sourced information on bloglines future.
They will do anything for a buck I guess except keep Bloglines running right:
http://searchen...0225-132836.php
@28 … if you can export an OPML file, you might find another service that will allow you to import the OPML file. The Google will tell you all about OPML as used for an RSS library.
Mike Rundle and I agree. I too have been using Bloglines for a very very long time, and I thought, huh. I guess it’s a sign to go do other things for now. Nothing to see here, folks, moving right along.
Hi everyone,
As noted, we experienced a technical glitch and feeds were not updating in Bloglines yesterday. We worked over the weekend and corrected the problem and are putting processes in place to minimize the possibility of this reoccurring in the future. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.
Our team is committed to improving Bloglines (we are absolutely not discontinuing the service!).
Eric Engleman
GM, Bloglines
eric – at- bloglines -dot- com
can’t imagine a reason yet invented to use anything BUT Google Reader….and I’m no Google fanboy…. they constantly improve features in little ways, and their blog (like most other Google services) keeps you in the know as to any coming changes. Just out of curiosity I exported my OPML file to bloglines before just to see if there was any killer feature I was missing out on…….nope. You can also tweak it in some interesting ways with Greasemonkey…. and usually they end up incorporating those scripts as default features anyway….in sum, Google Reader rocks HARD.
Bloglines mobile version is what keeps me from switching to Google Reader — especially the new bloglines mobile (http://m.beta.bloglines.com). The mobile version of Reader requires too many page loads to get through each feed. I find that the Bloglines version is much more compatible with treo 650 on AT&T’s network. YMMV, especially if you’re using a smaller screen and/or a faster network.
Unfortunatlely, unexpected downtime is a reality for just about every web-based application… Think of Twitter’s ongoing and YouTube’s recent struggles- yet, most users take it in stride and “try again later”.
It’s good to see that Bloglines is keeping tabs on blog activity and responding accordingly. I’m sure they’ll be “watching it like a hawk” going forward.
Poor Bloglines, it’s such a great service and I hope that they keep it, there is just so much out there and Bloglines is an excellent service to its users. They likely won’t discontinue the product, I hate rumors — What will happen and will they send out a release apologizing to their users?
Is there an estimate on the number of Bloglines users?
As for monetizing Bloglines, why don’t they just place ads all over the pages that are non-intrusive and contextual? Ask.com mostly gets their ads from Google and the other 1st-tier search engines — why don’t they just add that to Bloglines? There could also be ideas of revenue sharing?
customer service is key. What the exact truth is will be hard to determine, but at least the company should keep its customers informed. They now have a bigger mess to clean up from their customers.
Well I’ve switched to NewsGator, it doesn’t do everything Bloglines does but the uptime of Bloglines has been bugging me for a while – this is the second time in 6 months (atleast) where feeds stopped updating for a long period of time, and there are too many times when I’ve gotten the plumber or even just not got to the site at all.
Seems NewsGator might be cashing in on it, they’ve been the destination for a lot of people (Google Reader is known to most and I think we’ve all tried it, those who liked it probably moved already) and the NewsGator team posted a “new users” guide on their forum just a couple of hours ago, presumably for all those ex-Bloglines users.
http://forum.ne...c37297-4-1.aspx