{"id":8693,"date":"2010-12-24T11:55:13","date_gmt":"2010-12-24T18:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wapreview.com\/?p=8693"},"modified":"2010-12-24T11:55:13","modified_gmt":"2010-12-24T18:55:13","slug":"moving-on-from-mobile-bloglines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/8693\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving On From Mobile Bloglines"},"content":{"rendered":"

$\"Bloglines$ $\"Google$ <\/p>\n

Bloglines has been dying a slow death ever since IAC bought it in 2005. Earlier this year IAC announced that they were going to shut down the service in September.\u00a0 After a couple extensions of the deadline Bloglines was\u00a0 “saved” when Merchant Circle<\/a> , a social network for small businesses, acquired the brand.\u00a0 Initially we were told that nothing would change under the new ownership.\u00a0 Then early in December Merchant Circle let it be known that\u00a0 Mobile Bloglines, the only part of the service I used, was not going to be retained and that users would need\u00a0 to migrate their feeds from the “old” to the “new” Bloglines.<\/p>\n

I held out\u00a0 hope that the desktop version of the new Bloglines would still be somewhat usable in one or more of my mobile browsers so I went ahead with the mandatory migration.<\/p>\n

Migration did not go well, with Bloglines reporting that over two thirds of my feeds did not migrate automatically.\u00a0 I was supposed to be able to migrate the others manually by clicking on each one in a list and then clicking a confirmation dialog for each.\u00a0 The manual migration failed with a timeout error on the first few feeds I tried and I gave up thinking I would try again latter. When I did\u00a0 I couldn’t find a way to restart the migration or to get back into the “old” Blogines, which is supposed to be up until the end of the month, to export an OPML file.\u00a0 Fortunately, I did an export less than a month ago so I only lost a few subscriptions.<\/p>\n

The new Bloglines (image, below) which is “powered by NetVibes” seems nice enough on the desktop but is completely unusable in Opera Mini and Mobile and with the Android and Symbian browsers.\u00a0 While I appreciate Merchant Circle’s rescue of Bloglines, in its present form it’s not useful to me.<\/p>\n

$\"New$ <\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve switched to using the Google Reader Wii channel in Opera Mini Mobile View hack<\/a> (image top, right) that I wrote about when the closure of Bloglines was first announced.\u00a0 It’s not perfect, formatting is ugly and it’s too easy to accidentally activate a link scrolling the list.\u00a0 Plus, Reader will paginate the item list if there are more than 50 items and loading subsequent pages of items seems unreliable in Opera Mini.<\/p>\n

With the rise of Twitter, I’d been finding RSS less and less relevant anyway. I can follow the same bloggers and sites on Twitter and click through to their interesting posts and interact with the authors in real time.<\/p>\n

With Bloglines’ demise, I’ve\u00a0 switched almost completely to Twitter. I’ve removed most blog feeds from Reader and now follow the same bloggers on Twitter. I’m hoping the immediacy and interactiveness will make up for the inefficiency of having to click through from Tweet to site. For the few feeds, like MyOpera and developer forums, that aren’t\u00a0 on Twitter I’m using the Wii version of Google Reader.<\/p>\n

Still, I’m going to miss Bloglines Mobile.\u00a0 It was without a doubt the fastest and easiest way to keep up with your own personalized river of news. If by some miracle it were revived I switch back to it in a heartbeat.<\/p>\n