e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Bloglines

  • Bloglines: Still Sucky After All These Years

    Apparently, Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher replied to June Oshiro’s blog regarding their broken feed reader. June hits the nail on the head with her reply:

    But Mark! You don’t address the second fundamental problem. I find this ironic and indicative of the whole issue – I complain that customer support is virtually non-existent, and you seem to pretend I never mentioned it. So let me ask you – do you believe that the issue of tech support not responding is fixed? Are you monitoring that situation as well? Mark, you are the leader of Bloglines – your employees take their cue FROM YOU about company priorities. If you don’t emphasize the importance of responding to customer concerns, who will?

    Here are some questions I’d like you to think about. Why doesn’t anyone from support read the discussion forum? Why isn’t there a bulletin board detailing known issues (and estimated time until they’re fixed)? Why did customer support ignore 4 out of 6 attempts to contact them? (I was polite. I even said “pretty please.”) Why couldn’t anyone tell me, over two weeks of emails, that there was nothing wrong with my feed, and that the problem was on the Bloglines end?

    The difference in attitude between Bloglines and a company like, say, Jotspot is night and day. Jotspot shows the kind of obsession with good customer service that a web services company needs to have while Bloglines…well…does not.

  • Why Bloglines Sucks

    OK, after getting some helpful comments on my earlier post, mostly by a pMachines programmer (along with a somewhat more passive aggressive but at least marginally helpful post from somebody at Bloglines), I think I’m beginning to understand the problem. The short version is that there is something wrong with my blog feed but the Bloglines crawler and customer service reps both handle the situation very poorly.

    Bear with me on this, because it taxes the limits of my technical competence…. (more…)

  • Well, Shut My Mouth! Bloglines Feed Is Fixed

    Update: According to a comment just posted by a Bloglines employee, the feed is not actually fixed yet. They blame it on my ISP’s header support, which I’ll look into, though I don’t understand why Bloglines is the only aggregator that has this problem.

    *******

    Naturally, they fix the feed just as I’m flogging them. (Not that they notified me; I just happened to recheck to confirm that it’s still broken–something I do about once a week.) I’m glad they fixed it but my criticisms stand.

  • Bloglines Still Sucks (Three Months and Counting…)

    Yup, the Bloglines feed for e-Literate is still broken after three months. Yup, I’ve sent them multiple emails letting them know that the feed is still broken. Yup, I even let them know (in pretty blunt terms) that I was letting my readers know about the problem. (My experience with other web service providers is that most of them–even the big ones, like Furl and JotSpot–are incredibly responsive to users in general and bloggers in particular.) Nope, they haven’t solved the problem. Nope, they haven’t communicated anything to me about their progress other than a generic “We’re looking into it” reply after every complaint I’ve sent.

    Nope, I’m not the only one who’s had problems with their service.

    Silent failures of service are not OK. And silent failures that affect hundreds of your users (at least) for months at a stretch are really, really not OK. I don’t care if the service is free; it is broken badly enough that it is effectively unusable. Furthermore, this kind of shoddy performance is liable give a bad name to web services in general. It highlights just how vulnerable you make yourself if you become dependent on an application that lives on somebody else’s server and is totally out of your control.

  • Don't Use Bloglines

    I had hoped that I wouldn’t have to post this, but it seems to be my only recourse at this point.

    Apparently, the Bloglines aggregator stopped updating my feed several months ago. I had no idea that this was happening; nor did my readers who subscribe through Bloglines. As far as they knew, I just wasn’t posting. Lucky for me, Amy Gahran decided to check my site after six weeks of silence and discovered that my site had indeed been updated. Once she alerted me of the problem, I emailed Bloglines immediately and got a “we’re looking into it” response within a couple of hours. A few days later, I checked the feed and thought it had been fixed. But I was mistaken; it still wasn’t updated. I have poked the Bloglines customer service email address a couple of more times over a period of several weeks, but they have never again responded to me; nor have they fixed the problem. A week ago, I sent them an email asking them to at least notify my Bloglines feed subscribers that the feed was down. Again, no response.

    Now, it’s bad enough that there has been a silent failure for several months that might never have been discovered. It’s worse that customer service is totally out to lunch. But worst of all is that I have no idea if e-Literate is the only broken feed. I suspect that it isn’t. For all we know, there could be silent failures happening all across the Bloglines service.

    I was seriously thinking about using Bloglines for my Windows machine, but I have concluded that I just can’t trust it. One broken feed from a site is bad enough. But I’d have no way of knowing if even dozens of my feeds were silently failing through their centralized system. Until they can provide substantially better assurances regarding quality and consistency of service, I’m afraid I’m going to have to recommend to people that they avoid using Bloglines.

  • Welcome Back, Bloglines Subscribers

    Apparently, Bloglines hasn’t been updating my feeds for the last two months. Thanks to Amy Gahran, I found out yesterday that this was(n’t) happening. I submitted a bug report to the Bloglines team and I’m happy to report that I had a “we’re working on it” non-automated response within a half hour or so. It looks like they have at least partly fixed the problem, though I’m still seeing something of a lag.

    Anyway, apologies to Bloglines subscribers who have been out of the loop since October. I’ll keep a closer eye on this in the future.