When a company’s last press release was put out in June of 2005, it’s probably wise not to expect a quick response. Still, users of RSS reader Bloglines are disappointed (and increasingly angry) following a long outage.
The starting point of the outage is difficult to pinpoint; some users appear to have been receiving perfect service all along. Complaints on a Bloglines support forum began snowballing on February 12th or so, though, and only this morning did signs of progress appear.
“[A] couple of my feeds have been updated,” writes “Krunk4Ever.” “[L]ooks like they’re working on the issue right now.” A commenter on a TechCrunch article makes a similar statement.
But it’s a bit too late for Bloglines, and its owner Ask, to retain some customers. “Mithras” recently wrote, “I used bloglines as my feed reader for the past couple of years, but I have noticed in the past that it takes a while to update feeds. And today it’s not updating at all. And so I also discovered how easy it is to export your subscriptions to google reader. Which is not down, and which seems to update very quickly. So, just like that, I think I’ve abandoned one web app for another.”
Bloglines should consider explaining its outage before even more users bail. Also, people who are waffling between services might want to know that the last post on the Official Google Reader Blog was made 18 days ago.