Bloglines becoming boring and stagnant

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Fri, 07/15/2005 - 10:50am.

I read an interview with Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President of Search Properties at Ask Jeeves. He touches on a few items related to Bloglines, which got me thinking. Has Bloglines become boring?

Bloglines is the number one web based RSS and feed aggregator on the market. Since Bloglines' introduction, it's been mentioned and pointed to as the gold standard in web based aggregators.

I'm a huge fan of Bloglines and have been since its inception. Lately, though, I've used Bloglines and shrugged my shoulders. What have they done lately to advance the metaphor of aggregation? Besides adding a few new feed ideas like weather, they haven't done much.

I live in Internet time. Internet time happens fast and it's where development cycles are measured in months and not years; especially if you are first to market with a product as Bloglines has been.

Here are the five top areas where Bloglines has stagnated:

Issue resolution: When Bloglines was young you could expect a competent, speedy answer to your questions. In the last three months this avenue has ground to a halt at Bloglines. The only support option offered is email. Wouldn't it make sense to have a company sponsored forums where everyone could help each other? One would have thought with the purchase by AskJeeves that customer service would increase instead of decreasing.
Feed discovery: Bloglines has a feature called Recommended Feeds. The idea is that once a day Bloglines will run through all the feeds they know about and offer you suggestions on feeds you might like. Unfortunately, it's broken and has been for months. This is the screen you get when you click on the option:

Folder management: Ever tried to move your folders? Good luck. Since the evolution of folders there has always been a convoluted process for folders management.
Feed information and management: I would love to see my feeds that haven't had a new item in them for the last 60 days. I can't do that with Bloglines. I'd love to see the date I added a certain feed to ascertain if a new feed is available. I can't do that. Is this feed RSS 1, RSS 2, Atom, etc? I can't find that out. Bloglines has all this information about my feeds, but they don't offer a way to get to it.
Horrible search: When Bloglines debuted it was ok that it had a very basic, limited search function. Basically, you can search for words, but that's it. They seemed to have stopped adding feeds to their search database, which makes it pretty useless. You can try it by searching for "clint barmes" in Bloglines. There are no entries.

So what's happened to Bloglines? The interview listed above shines a little light on what might be coming up, but not enough to show that there is progress being made? While Bloglines sits by and doesn't communicate, products like My Yahoo and Rojo are starting to erode the web based aggregator market share.