Bloglines DOESN'T suck. The dynamics and power of WOM and blogging

I love my circle of influence. I am friends with some amazing people, with influence across many gambits. And that circle reminds me why word of mouth, combined with blogging goes a long way in the way we live each and every day.

Only yesterday I blogged that I was having real difficulties with Bloglines reading Robert's feed. This was after I talked to someone inside Bloglines who told me this was an issue with how the feed was being intepretted. Robert saw my post, and wrote his own post (in his always controversial subject line way) that got the attention of Paul over at Bloglines who responded in kind.

Paul made it clear that the issue related to how their "Last-Modified" feature worked. As an interm fix, he disabled how that worked, and sure enough... it's working fine again.

Funny though, shortly after this all transpired Matt from Wordpress commented on Scoble's post that this was indeed an issue with how Wordpress was handing things, and that they are working on a fix for the bug. That's right... it's Wordpress's issue... NOT Bloglines.

So in just 24 hours, both Bloglines and Wordpress are on it... OVER the HOLIDAYS!. That's the power of word of mouth and blogging.

Now, I received a few comments and a LOT of email from people telling me to drop Bloglines and move the Google Reader. Forget that. I am a HAPPY fan of Bloglines. I have been using their new beta for some time now, and its been an AWESOME asset to how I manage all the feeds I read on a daily basis. I have tried Google Reader and just don't like how it lays out, how it handles the displaying of content and just how it works. I love the way the Pin and Save Library in the new beta works along side the new UX, and there is no way I am going to abandon a tool that is maturing like this that just works for me. Ya, they had an issue here... but the way they handle Last Modified content is MUCH nicer that how Google does it. At least for now (when it's turned back on) anyways.

My only complaint with Bloglines is their attitude towards support sometimes. Not with me directly. As you can see, thanks to someone I know inside Bloglines and Robert's post... it cascaded to a fix pretty quickly. What bothers me is the number of people that have commented on Robert's post, in the forums and in email to me that they are getting no help from Bloglines when they saw this issue earlier. Which has caused by my count at least 10 people in my circle of influence who have abandoned the service. That's really to bad. You really need to try the beta!

And I cringe when I see people like Paul say things like "In regards to placing blame". Holy cow. This isn't about blame. It's about just getting the damn thing fixed. BTW, if Bloglines is reading... you can close the latest support case on this matter. It's being addressed :-)

I love Bloglines. Their team makes great stuff. And as we can see over the last 24 hours, they do indeed care about what they do... as long as it gets enough attention in the community. Again... WOM and blogging reflecting the power of change.

Thanks to Robert, Paul and Matt for getting things together to make the blogging world a better place. And for reducing the number of duplicated posts from Robert. There is only so much Scoble one can take :-)