Bloglines has been having major problems for at least a week, maybe longer. A company spokesperson has acknowledged that the problems will only be solved when the whole site is moved to a new server farm, and the company has not said when that is going to happen.
Yesterday, in a comment on this site, Cathy Thompson, who handles media relations at Bloglines, promised more “transparency” and committed to updating the Bloglines announcements page with details of the problem and the solution. I sent an e-mail to Cathy today reminding her of that commitment, and she replied with a note that said, “Yes, we will blog it today.”
As of 5:00 PM PST, that page has no such announcement. Hey, Bloglines: It is really easy to post to a blog. Your own database had a half-billion posts in it two months ago and is growing by a few million posts every day! Can’t you do just one simple, honest explanation?
After at least a week of serious problems, Bloglines is still practicing mushroom management. Sorry if that sounds cold, but it’s the truth.
Update: The announcements page was updated last night at 11:00 PM with a short item that says: “Bloglines is experiencing some slowing in posting new blog and news feed articles during busy blogging hours. This is a temporary issue — we’ve simply outgrown our current facility. To fix it, we are moving our computer operations to a larger location that will give us plenty of room to grow. The slowdown doesn’t put any user accounts or subscriptions at risk, and everything will be back to speedy once our move is complete. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience during this process.”
Still no details on when users can expect the move to be complete. Days? Weeks? Months?
Ed Bott 
for the record, I am nothing to do with, nor have I ever been a part of, bloglines
Yeah, it does sound a bit cold – ultimately they are proividing a free service – cut them a little slack.
I’m going to keep using them, because despite the problems (and there have been a few), I like the interface, and I’d like to keep giving them my support. I will move eventually if things don’t improve, but for now, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt for having provided me with a good service thus far.
Having said that, I do beleive that they should have posted the real truth about what’s going on, including actual timescales for re-location – it’s an absurdley simple thing to do for a company that already owns a blog, and the fact that the company is based on the free trade of information makes it even more absurd that they shouldn’t do this.
I hope they have a little more faith in their users, and just tell us whats going on.
K
oops – just spotted my URL was wrong – It’s been a while since I’ve used it!
K
They’ve just now published an update: http://www.bloglines.com/about/news#89