a star of “the new internet” and rightly so for many reasons. But it’s purchase and seeming mothballing of the wonderful blo.gs service is not one of them. Like many people, I use an RSS aggregator for my bulk blog-reading needs – but that does not in any way make blo.gs redundant. If I need to read a site for the text only, an RSS reader is great, but it still doesn’t replace the experience of reading in a browser – and I haven’t yet met an RSS reader that works as a simple notifier. But I’ve written about all of this before.
What’s amazing is that since last summer when the service effectively became only marginally usable, there has been no information forthcoming from Yahoo! or any of its notable bloggers about what’s happening with the service. If it’s going to live, I would think that a short word to that effect would be quite useful – if it’s going to die, then just kill it already.
I also want to ask: is there an alternative? Can any RSS reader be configured to store a simple list of recently updated sites and not present the posts themselves and everything but just a link to the front of the blog that has been updated? What options are there to duplicate this dying service? And am I crazy for wishing there were?
Ed says
I’ll second that. You would think it would be super easy to whip up. I’m thinking of a simple app you run locally that doesn’t have to scale to thousands of users.
Michael Boyle says
Well this is the other thing – apparently the code behind blo.gs is open source. I don’t know how up to date it is and what it would take to open a service based on that code, but if Yahoo! has killed it, then there are options.
hugh says
if a web-based service would work, then http://collectik.net does this – though I think you are looking for a desktop-side app?