
The Death of the Feed
I remember in 2001 when I first heard about RSS. Back then, we still called them weblogs, and there were so few blogs that it was news when a new one started. For example, I distinctly remember reading excitedly about a promising new VC blogger named Jeff Nolan from SAP Ventures. At first, I just […]

Has Twitter Finally Killed Summize?
Since today appears to be Twitter-day (which day isn’t?), I’m adding my 2 cents. Summize has always been fast and reliable. In fact in the days of the worst Twitter outage, with Reply and other functions disabled, Summize was the savior of the Twitterverse. But now that Twitter acquired Summize, I’m seeing it dead quire […]

Oh, No, the RSS Debate Again…
The “Email is Dead” theme is so last year, this year’s classic is the “RSS is Dead” debate, resurfacing every three months or so. Today it was likely sparked by the Googlers themselves, prompting Sam Diaz @ Between the Lines quickly declare he was no longer using feed readers. But Marshall Kirkpatrick says he “uses […]

Google Reader Gets Improvements, but Offline is Ignored Again
Whenever a Google product gets updates, tiny or big, there’s a chorus of praise … which is OK, after all everyone needs link-bait, but what about some critical thinking? Today’s big new is additional social sharing and “mark as read” controls – they are all useful, you can read the details from any of the […]

How Many Times Can We Bury Bloglines? Google Reader Rules. But How Good is That?
Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr TechCrunch put Bloglines in their Deadpool today. I think it’s long been there. I wrote my R.I.P Bloglines piece months ago, when Bloglines represented a whopping 4% of our feed readers, down from 25% 3 years ago. I declared: There is Only One Feed Reader – Google and I’m afraid […]

Moving Beyond RSS (Maybe)
Something weird is happening with me and RSS. I should preface this by saying that I’m a *classic* late adopter (insert irony here) for a ton of things (I don’t have an iPhone; hell, i don’t CARRY a cell phone 90% of the time), but a semi-early adopter for other things. The things I tend […]

Bloglines Offline, But Who Cares? It's Been Comatose Anyway.
The weekend’s non-news is that feed reader Bloglines is down. Who cares… in fact has anyone noticed it? The once dominant feed-reader has been on the decline for years, and no, the decline did not start with the sale to Ask, but long before. Ask apparently failed to sell it, does not know what to […]

The Bogus RSS Debate
Why Bogus? Because it’s not a real debate. It’s just bombastic statements, and a perfect link-bait – which I admit I’ve just taken. Steve Gillmor no longer uses Google Reader, he gets all the information he wants from Twitter, so he declares RSS dead. He says the race for real-time is already won. I agree […]

There is Only One Feed Reader – Google
Let’s face it, Game Over, nothing stands up to Google Reader. Last time I checked Feed Reader stats on my personal blog, I could observe Bloglines decline, but it still had significant market share, almost equal to up-and-coming Google: Three years later Google Reader has 52% share, while Bloglines shrank to a pitiful 13%. […]

We Need Feedburner Alternatives
CloudAve uses Feedburner. If you blog, chances are, you too. We all are. An that’s becoming a problem. Feedburner has become the de facto standard – third party or not, we like to publish our Feedburner feed, instead of our platform’s native RSS or Atom feeds, for the added convenience of getting all stats and […]

We’ve Moved: Feedburner Migration Not Without Glitches
Feedburner started as a cool new blog feed management/reporting service a few years ago, and quickly became a de facto standard. A quick scan of my Feed Reader shows hardly anything but Feedburner. Since Google acquired the company almost two years ago, we haven’t seen a lot of new services – but that does not […]

Google Reader Offline: Smart Yet Dumb
2008 REDUX Another piece in the 2008 Redux series, originally referring back to a 2007 post, and what’s mind-boggling is the issue is still not fixed. Yes, it’s great to be able to download my feed items and read it on the plane without Internet connection (since I am not flying Virgin). I even "starred" […]