Bloglines | News

Over the last couple of weeks, we've been chatting with Blogliners in our forums, reviewing mailed in feedback and reading your blogs.  It's been fun to see how excited people are about Bloglines.  We aim to keep you that way.

The latest launch offers up Inline Editing of Feeds and Folders. We pushed it out last night.  It looks like we were caught by Nathan Weinberg. Here's a quick summary.

Inline Edit Feeds and Folders - You can change the feed or folder title name and set individual feed/folder settings such as display updated items, display in Bloglines notifier, display in Bloglines Mobile and of course set your privacy settings for your feed or folder.   See screenshot below.

You might ask, "What does it mean to set my privacy settings for a feed or folder?" If you have your settings as public, your feed library is available to the world. Here's an example of a part of my feed library so you can see what I read.

The next set of releases will feature personalization preferences including:

New preferences allowing you to select different read/unread modes (Classic or Beta) Bloglines Mobile "Clippings" which will be renamed "Saved."

We'll keep you posted as we get closer.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Source cohdra

Last week we launched our beta site and it looks like many of you noticed. The overall response was exceptionally favorable, but one topic was lost in the excitement: the site is still under construction! Many people thought we were done. On the other hand, a number of our classic Blogliners pointed out several of their favorite features missing or not implemented quite right.  Both parties are right. If the beta currently fulfills your needs, great move right in. If it doesn't fulfill your needs right now, don't fret, we still have a large number of features to implement and a few features to refine. Take your time.

We've been listening to our core users and rolled out several features from Bloglines Classic which were frequently requested by our Blogliners. Keep an eye out for these new icons:

Keep as New - retitled "Pin" - This feature temporarily saves a post in the reading view.  It's very useful for when you see a large post, but don't have enough time to read the post. Email this - One of the great things about a feed reader is sharing all of the great posts you discover.  Click on the email button at the bottom of a post and you can send those especially interesting posts to a friend.

We've also implemented a couple of other features available in the current site.

Help - We've implemented a dynamic help site using Right Now Technologies. It'll allows us to create help articles on the fly. We're also going to experiment with pointing out to great help content created by our user community. So if we see a great tutorial someone has written, we just might link to you. Hotkeys - The majority of hotkeys are working: "j" - advance forward in the reading view "k" - move backwards in the reading view "r" - refresh left pane "s" - advance to the next feed "f" - advance to the next folder "A" - mark your selected feed or folder as read "n" - toggle Pin - different in Classic "o" - open article in new window - different in Classic

I've included a couple of screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

We'll continue to listen to Blogliners in the forums and across the web. Our next set of features we're working on will include editing feed subscription preferences and creation of additional beta preferences that will allow you to configure the beta to handle read/unread posts just like in classic Bloglines.

We'll keep you all posted as we get closer. Again thanks for the feedback.

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team.

Photo Courtesy of StockVault

Wow! We were a little overwhelmed by the positive response our Beta received earlier in the week. We expected a few in the tech-set to write reviews, but never imagined the out-pouring of excitement. I thought I would share some of the high-points.

Read Write/Web did an exceptionally detailed review and here's a little except, "Bloglines has me back as a fan!" Even the competition likes Blogline Beta. Chris Wetherall of Google Reader described Bloglines as, "Wicked Cool." 3,000 posts were written across the web. Most of these from Blogliners excited about the return of Bloglines.  I love you Blogliners! Lots of people were and continue to discuss future releases of Bloglines in our Forums.

But we also wanted you to know that we heard another message---Don't take too long to release additional features!

We'll be listening to you and announcing additional features going forward. In fact, our next feature slated for release is "Keep as New." This was the single most-requested item from active Blogliners. We're working on it right now. We'll keep you posted on this and other releases as we get closer.

Cheers!

Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Blogliners we're proud to introduce a beta of our latest redesign of Bloglines. Our About Beta overview outlines the key features a personalizable home page, 3 reading-views and drag-and-drop foldering in an Ajax interface. We're inviting you, the Bloglines fans, to the new Bloglines beta in the redesign cycle to provide us feedback. We look forward meeting you in the forums or at conferences to brainstorm on ways to make Bloglines an even better feed reader.

The current Beta is available for Firefox and IE 7 browsers. Of course, the full-featured original Bloglines will still be available during the Beta period.

Enjoy!

- The Bloglines Team

You know a conference is going to be good when the first person you run into is one of your power users. For Gnomedex 2007, my first conference as the new GM of Bloglines, I hoped to meet many Bloglines fans, and sure enough, I wasn't disappointed. Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, who says his second most important thing in life is Bloglines, got me started off in style We chatted and he told me some of his favorite features and the way he uses Bloglines. He likes the hack by John Hicks for a Mac-like interface.

Later in the day, I got to meet Stan James, Founder and CTO of Lijit. Friends told me to be sure to talk to him. He's a bit of a wunderkind who got VC interest in his PHD dissertation. Also, he's a big fan of Bloglines and has been analyzing public Bloglines data and talking with other researchers for a while now.

On Saturday, I was spacing out for a moment when I noticed the person in front of me scanning through loads of feeds at lightspeed. Once I noticed the Bloglines logo, I knew we had to chat. It turned out to be Arieanna Schweber, a long-time Bloglines user. We chatted for a bit and she pointed out a few things she would like to enhance in the future. She also works at B5 who is looking to hire bloggers.

I've been busy the last couple of months working with the team to define our next major releases. We've been talking to Blogliners and charting the next generation version of feed readers. I look forward to meeting all of the big fans of Bloglines at future conferences and of course in our user forums.

We'll keep you posted on key events going forward. We can't wait to show you what we've been working on.

Cheers.

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Our latest version of iBloglines brings even more features to the iPhone, so many more features we consider this our "Ultimate Pro" Edition. No other feed reader comes close. It's clear that iBloglines rules the feed reading space on the iPhone. Here's the latest set of iBloglines goodness:

Pin - Save the story for when you get back to your Mac or PC. Email Articles - Sharing is fun. Search - Find the latest buzz with our blog and feed search. Auto Refresh of "My Library" - No need to hit refresh to get the latest updates. Hide Images - We know EDGE is slow, and your time is valuable. Preferences - Personalizing is essential. Our Blogliners love to personalize their experience so they can optimize their feed reading flow.

Have Fun!

- The Bloglines Team

Unlike most of the tech world, we've been doing more than just playing with our beloved new iPhones. We've been adapting our apps to integrate with them. Case in point: our lead developers Paul Querna's weekend project, now complete and known to us as iBloglines. We then gathered our iPhone enabled staff to test iBloglines (and, in general, marvel over our new toys).

Thanks to our team, I can present to you iBloglines, optimized for the iPhone. iPhoners, fire up your browsers and go to i.bloglines.com. Then touch/tap your screen to feed-reading heaven.

As a preview here's a screenshot of iBloglines.

Enjoy!

- The Bloglines Team

If you haven't noticed any problems with your Bloglines service over the last 2-3 days, you can stop reading here.

For those of you who MAY have noticed a small hiccup or two, there's a simple reason for it: Some of the new services we rolled out last week have been restarting due to a small glitch in our network protocol.

These hiccups rarely occur and last a very short amount of time--less than one second. Even so, we wanted you to know that we have tracked down the issue and fixed the problem.

We're sorry about the inconvenience and will continue to monitor the situation.

-The Bloglines Team

In the week since we launched The Bloglines Image Wall, it's certainly garnered its fair share of attention. Some of it we expected or hoped for; some if it, quite the opposite. But having listened to all of it, we think a change--and a little explanation on how we came to it--is in order.

Launching and Learning

As we wrote when we launched, we built the Image Wall as a cool, experimental, demonstration of the diversity of visual content that appears in syndicated feeds at any moment in time. Sure some of the images turn out to be awful, but some turn out to be great art and either way you can instantly see the diversity. We found that to be pretty amazing.

Nevertheless, we recognized that the Image Wall, as a reflection of the feeds in Bloglines (and thus a reflection of the Web itself) would not be appropriate for everyone. We took steps to mitigate the potential offensiveness, but still allow for the fascinating diversity to shine through.

Helping Our Audience Protect Theirs

However, we now realize we didn't take into proper consideration how the Image Wall might impact educators, librarians and other people who have a responsibility for limiting access to adult material. Many of these good folks are users and even advocates of Bloglines. They form a community that we respect and admire. For them, simply making the personal choice not to view the Image Wall after reading the disclaimer is not sufficient to satisfy their obligations to those they are charged with protecting.

These valid concerns place the Image Wall squarely in the middle of the classic tension between "freedom of expression" and "freedom from expression". It's not a tension unfamiliar to libraries, schools (or, for that matter a search company), as each struggles to strike the right balance between access and restriction.

Over the past week, with the help and advice of many of you, we've been working to strike that balance for the Image Wall and the users of Bloglines. We feel we've found it.

Naming a Solution

Effective today, Bloglines will move the Image Wall to its own, new domain at http://www.bloglinesimagewall.com. Now, any school, library, parent/guardian or third party filtering service can add this full domain to their list of restricted domains to be blocked.

If/when the Image Wall URL is selected by a computer that has blocked www.bloglinesimagewall.com the page will NOT appear. It's that simple. Blocking that domain will not impact the continued use of the Bloglines service.

We believe that those most concerned about access restrictions will have filtering software on their computers, and this change should make it easy to permanently opt-out of the Image Wall for all the computers under their control.

Furthermore, to better ensure that the Image Wall is appropriately restricted, we have contacted each of the major filtering services and asked that www.bloglinesimagewall.com be added to their list of adult websites. We ask those of you who belong to this community assist us in getting the word out to anyone who should have this information.

Finding the Right Balance - With Your Help

We hope that in making these changes we've struck the correct balance between information access and restriction. It has always been our intention to serve everyone who uses and relies on Bloglines, whether they choose to view the Image Wall, or whether, like thousands of educators and librarians, they may wish to restrict the Image Wall to protect those under their responsibility.

We will continue to closely monitor how this solution works out and, as always, your feedback is (and has been) tremendously appreciated.

--The Bloglines Team

The hard-working engineers at Bloglines spend most of their time bringing you your favorite blog & feed content... but they've also been known to come up with some cool stuff above and beyond the call of duty. Presenting: The Bloglines Image Wall .

Here's the deal. Bloglines indexes zillions of pages every hour -- and just as many images. The Bloglines Image Wall picks up these images as they come in and places them into a constantly updated grid.

You'll never see the Wall the same way twice - in fact, it changes right before your eyes. Curious, funny, challenging, good, bad, and ugly - it's all there. The variety alone is fascinating.

It's a great way to see what's happening in the blogosphere at any moment in time. And each image is clickable, taking you to its source blog or feed in Bloglines with a handy subscribe link at the top if you like what you see. The Image Wall is a whole new way to discover new content. It's interesting -- sometimes mesmerizing -- and just plain fun. See for yourself!

-The Bloglines Team

Okay, who knew Bloglines had feedback forums? Show of hands. Yep, that’s what we thought. Well, we’ve got ‘em. In fact, we’ve just given them a good solid revamp and hope that you’ll drop by and participate.

Let us know what you like, don’t like, are having difficulty with, what you spilled on your keyboard while checking the Penny Arcade feed… We, and your fellow Bloglines users, are here for you. Check it out.

Attention Blogliners!

If you're reading this, you're already drinking the Bloglines Kool-Aid. So how about mixing up a few batches with us?

We're looking to add two more incredibly talented people to our Bloglines team: specifically a Bloglines Director and a Senior UI Engineer. Interested - or know someone who might be?

Join and help us make Bloglines THE home page for the 21st Century.

-The Bloglines Team

Bloglines will be performing some system upgrades on Friday December 1 at 9:00 PDT. During this time, users may experience some degradation in the site. We expect to be finished with out maintenance in 1 hour. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to be back up to speed shortly.

-The Bloglines Team

You use Bloglines because it helps you keep track of your favorite blogs and feeds. But what if you have certain feeds you view only in the morning? Certain feeds you look at to cheer you up, or when the boss isn't around? You don't want to re-arrange your whole "My Feeds" listing just for those occasional whims or times of day. That's why Bloglines introduces not one, but two new services to make things easier.

Playlists lets you create short groupings of feeds to access from your main list. Create as many as you like, and use them to personalize your Bloglines experience that much more. Create them, change them, even delete them--all without changing your original "tree" of feeds. What song playlists are to your MP3 library, Bloglines Playlists are to your Bloglines blogs & feeds.

Want a quick look of those Playlists you just created? That's what Glimpse is for. Click on one of your Playlists in your left nav and you'll see the first five posts for every feed in that Playlist. Don't like the order of your feeds? Drag and drop 'em until you do. It's easy. Plus, you can set one Playlist up as a default--and it'll be the first thing you see every time you launch Bloglines.

Playlists and Glimpse are two more ways we're working to make your Bloglines experience easier--and just maybe, a little more fun. Have any questions? Let us know!

-- The Bloglines Team

Bloglines will be down on Thursday November 9, at 9:00 PM PDT. We will be making a hardware upgrade and should be down for only 30 minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to be up and running ASAP.

-The Bloglines Team