I’ll have to agree with you on the look of the “full” site though, it could use the services of a good designer. However, it works and it’s available for me on my Treo and home and work computers without having to load extra software or worry about synchronization.

I remember at SXSW 2006 there was a panel on RSS: Not Just For Blogs Anymore. On the panel was some marketing person from bloglines, and I was bitching and moaning about how bloglines is hard to use and never improved (UI-wise). I think the people around me thought I was some crazy dude bitching about the silliest things. I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one.

There is really only one thing keeping me with bloglines: mark all as read. Google Reader, wtf? People have been bitching about that for nearly a year now!

Different applications entirely. Whether Technorati can get people to see the difference is an open question, but they only need a fraction of Google’s traffic to be able to sustain a fairly good sized organization.

On another note: I work at Edgeio. Thanks for the 5K+ visitors your link to Edgeio in the last post brought so far, btw. ;) Obviously I think you completely missed the plot about us. In particular, those Chinese listings aren’t spam, but well, Chinese listings. Spam has been an extremely small problem for us so far.

If you want local listings, then set your location. The geography widget is there for a reason. And a Chinese site is right around the corner.

As for people posting listings on their blogs, they do, but where did you get the idea that it’s the only (or even the biggest) source of listings for us? In fact the vast majority of listings come from professionals, for many of whom the tiny effort to get data into Edgeio by turning it into feeds is already paying off.

> “Look at Apple and it’s iPod dominance… that hasn’t stopped them from pushing the device to its limits which has only kept its marketshare high.”

Seriously? I don’t think limited photo, video and games capabilities constitute a great return for 5 years worth of “pushing the device to its limits”. It’s pretty much exactly what it is when it launched: 1,000 songs in your pocket. Yes, it’s now more songs, and yes, your pocket is now lighter (and your wallet a little fatter), but Apple certainly haven’t had to innovate. It’s just no-one else has made anything good enough to force them to innovate.

As a regular user of Bloglines I treat it as more of a quick stop than an experience – see what’s new, take a quick look to see if there’s anything worth reading, and then move on.

So, in that respect, maybe it is *more* like Google than you think. To your point, what sort of ‘experience’ you would like to create for Bloglines users?

I’d also be careful about dismissing Google so out of hand. Just because something looks simple doesn’t necessarily mean that it is – especially when it comes to laying out the search results pages.

I actually have a great deal of respect for how Google has maintained the simplicity of its home page. From my experience running the web site and intranet for a large(ish) organization, I know the pressures that can be put on you to keep adding stuff to the home page without consideration for what will be useful to users.