dsandler.org/wp

Wow, search engine also-ran Ask Jeeves is suddenly relevant again, now that it’s buying Bloglines.

Aside: By grepping dsandler.org for bloglines you can see how my affection for Mark Fletcher’s brainchild has waxed and waned over the last year.

I became aware of Bloglines in July of 2003, when I noticed some bizarre entries in my http log and a sudden extreme spike in bandwidth. It turned out to be a bug in Mark’s new RSS crawling service, which we worked together to squash. I signed up for Bloglines when it opened its doors in September, and enjoyed using it for about a year.

In the days before the other big players in Web portals really threw their weight behind RSS, Bloglines was the easiest way to introduce a newcomer to news feed aggregation with a simple Web UI. Recently I’ve become convinced that (with very few exceptions) you won’t get as fluid or as flexible a user experience with a Web application as with a traditional desktop app, and I think this goes double for RSS reading, which is a high-volume, real-time endeavor. I think Mark’s done a great job, and kudos for the (pending, rumored) sale, but RSS power users will likely continue to prefer power apps, like David Watanabe’s NewsFire (the slick up-and-comer) and Ranchero’s NetNewsWire (the old standard, recently re-streamlined).

It is these desktop apps that can benefit most from efficient and immediate newsfeed distribution like the kind proposed in the FeedTree paper for IPTPS.