Bloglines woes
<rant>
I have some problems with Bloglines. I got thinking about this after reading this post by Richard MacManus (a Web 2.0–focused blogger).
Hands down, I prefer server-based news aggregators for their shear convenience at keeping me in sync wherever I go. I use NewsGator for Outlook for the blogs inside my company’s firewall since a server-based news aggregator can’t see them.
Simply put, bloglines has been stagnant for a while. This is dangerous for a market leader.
Bloglines also claims to be HTML 4.01 Transitional compliant and it’s not. This means trouble for non-standard browsers. Not that this will really drive boardroom meetings, but it’s now affecting me more.
Bloglines doesn’t support CSS so when I try to read my blogs on the train via my wireless PDA, I’m stymied by the default layout which simply doesn’t work with a small screen.
Bloglines doesn’t allow me to interact with my own blog. Bloglines creates a blog for you and allows you to blog about entries your reading but your posts can only be directed to their blogging service. I would love if they could plug into the other systems out there like Flickr does.
Plus, services like Flickr are improving every day! Just recently Flickr responded to user demand and changed their architecture away from Flash and toward DHTML. I haven’t inspected this yet, but the point that they are listening is what I’m speaking to. Flickr also added support to map tags to IPTC keywords, which are “tags” embedded in most or all JPG files. I should know more about IPTC, but alas that’s another bookmark I’ve buried.
Why isn’t bloglines improving? Are their hidden features that I’m missing?
</rant>