Bloglines Suffers Major Outage
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.
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Bloglines Gets A Triple Dose Of New Features
Bloglines has added three new features to its RSS reading service.
First up is the ability to save posts including text and graphics from within Bloglines to a “Saved” folder. This allows users to have quick access to previously read posts at a later date.
“Photo Widget” provides large thumbnails of images from Flickr feeds; previously only a text description was available.
Last, but certainly not least is the blog view function. The allows users to switch into a 3-pane view that shows the full post on the actual blog, as opposed to just a feed only version of it. What this means is that you can now view a full post within Bloglines where only a part-text feed is offered, but perhaps more impressively users will be able to interact with the blog as well, for example read comments and see other elements of the site, including ads.
The new Bloglines was launched in August and since that time Bloglines has continued to roll out improvements and new features, including support for OpenID (with APML and oAuth support coming). Bloglines has lost its once dominant lead in the RSS Reader market, mostly to Google, but with continuing feature additions such as these it offers an appealing product that may well be worth another look for those who have left, or for those who have never tried Bloglines before.
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Bloglines Supports OpenID, Will Support oAuth and APML
The IAC owned Bloglines has announced a number of new and intended features today. OpenID for Bloglines accounts joins with a new version of Bloglines Mobile beta and new personalization features as being available immediately.
Perhaps more interesting from a particular perspective is Bloglines’ intention to provide support for oAuth (Open Authentication) and APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language). In laymen’s terms Bloglines will allow users to take control of their Attention Profiles.
Bloglines has lost momentum over the last 12-24 months as Google’s excellent Google Reader service has taken the market lead according to some reports. A new Bloglines version was launched in August and todays announcement would seem to be part of Bloglines strategy of dealing itself back into the attention stream of the RSS reading public.
(thanks to Chris Saad for the tip)
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All New Bloglines Launches in Beta
Bloglines now has three viewing options - quick view (the new Ajax drag and drop view in the image to the left), three pane “Outlook-like” view and the classic full view with two panes. The site is also trying to manage unread feeds more intelligently, a common user complaint in the past.
The company says more changes are coming. Options for saving, sending and sharing stories, tools for building link blogs, managing blog rolls, etc. are all on the way. In the meantime, the classic bloglines site will remain available at bloglines.com. Feeds remain synced between the two sites.
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