Legal Research

Bloglines Fail #fail

By admin

OK, so today I decided to transfer my Bloglines RSS feed to the new Merchant Circle version of Bloglines.

I still liked the old Bloglines RSS reader but I did back it up in Google Reader. I had (thankfully) rebuilt my Google Reader feeds a few months ago and it went swimmingly. Every feed transferred and it all loaded fine. I am not that comfortable with the G-Reader interface but it’s OK.

I figured that the same would happen again with this migration. What a mess!

I clicked on the button and migrated the feeds. I got a message instantly that the feeds had transferred to the MerchantCircle Bloglines except for a few. That missing few was 517 (YES 517!!) feeds which they e-mailed to me as a list of URLs. That’s more than half of my feeds to handcraft back in. There appears to be no way to go back to the old version (like Twitter has done) but they don’t tell you that when you initiate the transfer. Lastly, the new interface is amazingly confusing and makes me feel stupid. They seem to have randomly chosen a date to start your feeds as opposed to where you left off reading. What a crock. I really want to look at over 150,000 repeat feeds! And the new interface is awful. Even the Bloglines logo takes up about three times the space just to make sure you can’t see as much of your feeds. Is the logo all that important? And it’s a really, really slow. Oh yeah, the icing on the cake is that the interface has crashed my laptop three times so I’ve now removed the bookmark and won’t be back. If you can’t manage a migration, display RSS feeds well, not crash and/or improve the interface, then what were your goals with this acquisition?

Anyway, this is a total failure and I won’t be back. They did the impossible. They got this guy to convert to a Google product.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on December 16, 2010 (boomark / email).