Whats wrong with the Internet?
June 22nd, 2006 at 09:47pm
Well, for the past two three days lots of things are not in place. First of all, my Bloglines aggregator is behaving like a total bitch. For some damn reason, Bloglines is not updating some of my feeds, which is driving me nuts.
Yesterday, Yahoo! mail, messenger and many of other yahoo services were down …
Orkut has gone bonkers for the past couple of days. It was down for maintenance for quite a lot of time. Also,.. the “Bad server, No doughnut” error is back!
There were reports that even Google/Gmail services was behaving erratically for some users.
And in the next day or two, the ’stupid’ net-neutrality bill would be passed. Sad news for the entire Internet community. Is this the beginning of, the End of Internet ?…
BTW, any alternative for a good web-based news aggregator ?
I tried the web-based newsgator - did not like it. I guess I am too addicted to the bloglines style of display.
Tried Yahoo! Mail (beta) RSS feed reader feature - did not like it either - Navigation is not that great. No import/export features yet.
Google reader - Tried my best to use it. But found it too user-unfriendly. This is one product from Google which I kind of hate now. Its such a pain.
The best alternative for Bloglines so far has been the “Sage” extension for Firefox. It works cool. But the only problem is, it does not aggregate & its not web-based. i.e, It just displays the most recent feed items that are available. So, I would miss quite a lot of news items. :(
Any better alternatives ? I would prefer something web-based so that I can access the feeds from anywhere using a browser (preferably Firefox!)
Update (10.25 PM) : Got a reply from the Bloglines customer service department for the feedback that I had given about the above problem. They are saying that they are aware of the problem, and are looking into it. I checked my Bloglines feed now, and it seems to be back to normal now!
Tags: bloglines, bloglines problem, feed aggregator, feed readers, google reader, news readers, problem, reader, RSS feed reader, sage
Entry Filed under: Net, Technology
11 Comments Add your own
1. Harsha | June 22nd, 2006 at 11:05 pm (subscribed to comments)
Hi Arjun,
Did you try the RSS Bandit?
Its a full application and you can download it from http://www.rssbandit.org
I prefer this one. Works well for me since last 2 months. It feels more like an outlook. Dont like the web based stuff
2. jac | June 23rd, 2006 at 3:16 pm (subscribed to comments)
Hi Arjun,
have you tried live.com or start.com
Both from MS, but does have a cool interface
3. Naresh | June 25th, 2006 at 5:22 pm (subscribed to comments)
I am using RSSOwl since quite some time.
http://www.rssowl.org/
Wiki has a good description about this on,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSSOwl
See if you like it.
4. Smiling Girl | June 26th, 2006 at 5:06 am
Came here through Harsha’s blog.
Well… yeah, Blogger also joined the list. I was not able to comment for quite soemtime yday. Orkut and Gmail were also weird!!!
And felt good to see that you are also a fellow Mangalorean!
5. Venu | June 29th, 2006 at 4:55 pm (subscribed to comments)
I felt that google reader is pretty good. If you get used to the shortcut keys (n,j,v etc) in google reader, its much easier to use it, and it feels a lot more powerful.
6. Vishal | July 1st, 2006 at 12:09 am (subscribed to comments)
Hi Arjun,
Dont knw if you remember me. You taught RDBMS to our training batch in mysore in aug 04. I am from MIT too..
But why did u say Google Reader is user unfriendly? I use Google reader on a daily basis and find it to be the most intuitive way to read feeds.
7. Arjun | July 4th, 2006 at 1:29 am
@ Venu & @Vishal : I think you have to use Bloglines for a couple of hours! Its simple, and easy to use.
The problem with google user is, it needs too many clicks!. Now, this matters since I subscribe to around 120 feeds, and I read quite a lot. I would like to get rid (or in other words, mark many items as ‘read’) of items that are of not intrest to me at the moment.
I would also like to read all the news items of a given feed without any randomness.
I somehow found google reader to be too random, and I have no way to mark items as ‘read’ unless I actually select/click.
Too much of clicks…………..
I would suggest both of you to give bloglines a try!…
8. Arjun | July 4th, 2006 at 1:30 am
@Vishal : Nice to hear from you. But, I sincerely don’t recall your face! Sorry about it!. BTW, how are you doing ? are you still with Infy?
9. Vishal | July 4th, 2006 at 12:00 pm (subscribed to comments)
Hi Arjun..
me doing good.. thanks to the RDBMS training :)
checked out Bloglines… it sure is simpler… but it doesnt show a brief description of the feed… Google reader tends to show a lot of the text on the reader itself.. i think Google wins there…
10. veekay | July 5th, 2006 at 1:32 pm (subscribed to comments)
Arjun,
If you are looking for an online feed reader, check out Rojo -
http://www.rojo.com
It has some good web2.0 features …
Or you can even try a nice portal (startpage) like NetVibes -
http://www.netvibes.com/
It is beautiful and addictive…
Regards,
veekay
11. Arjun | July 12th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Google Reader fails to impress Jeremy after using it for over a week! No wonder!!
Check this link :
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007016.html
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