Sunday, May 29

I've loved you blogger.com, why have you abandoned me?

Perhaps this is overly dramatic, perhaps I'm blind to some critical blogger strategy, but blogger.com seems to have stagnated and is possibly even hemorrhaging. I sent the following post to blogger.com support just minutes ago. If you're reading this in a feed reader it's been truncated, please come read it on my blog.

--- to whom it may concern at blogger.com ------------------
I just noticed that blogger has been truncating my feed.

http://mmeiser.com/blog/atom.xml

I just noticed this today, but I have no idea how long this has been going on. Perhaps a week, maybe more. I haven't changed my feed settings in blogger in forever. Perhaps over a year, so you can imagine my alarm. I double check them summarization is off, my full feed should be posting.

This is especially a problem since I'm a video blogger and you've essentially castrated all my video posts which are not getting picked up in aggregators, because they're not in my feed because of this. I'm sort of peeved but trying not to get to mad. I'm trying to remember what blogger meant to me when I started blogging. There use to be love there for this service. I don't know any more though.

Please, Please, fix this problem right away.

On a side note, an IMPORTANT side note, blogger was / is a great service, but since it got bought out by google it has more than completely stagnated. I cannot even think of ONE new feature added since Google acquired blogger.

The Atom feed technology blogger uses is completely antiquated. Luckily others such as feedburner have picked up on this. They've built an industry on this in fact thanks largely to you. Meanwhile the profile page, once the life blood of the blogger social network has been broken for over a year. Latest posts have not updated and word count has stopped.

I find this upsetting and completely out of character with google, what's more your competitor Yahoo has been buying up services also. Services like Flickr which has seen an acceleration in developments if anything since yahoo bought them out. Doubling capacity on pro accounts, halving what was an incredible introductory price. Improving usability, functionality and accessibility. Meanwhile you've SAT ON a potential golden jewel for google. If search is your life blood, then blogger is your heart.

You haven't rolled out any new premium services. You haven't gotten categories or tags! What about trackbacks? You haven't improved any search mechanism. You haven't even acknowledged podcasters or video bloggers. Wouldn't it be SWEET to add field that managed podcasts or videos and generated the proper RSS code, the proper embed code, perhaps an optional pop out window?

You haven't updated ping tools for new dozens of new tracker services. You haven't created any API's for extending blogger, and finally you've barely expended the resources to keep blogger going. Just what have you been up to!? I repeat... ***crown jewel potential, squandered***.

It's alarming. So alarming I'm probably going to move to Wordpress or moveable type. What gives!? Please do tell!?

May I point out that web-services have a HUGE advantage over open source MT and Wordpress packages. You're centralized nature gives you the ability to respond to new technologies and standards, to drive innovation, to help propagate open standards, and push these fluidly into the hands of bloggers where they can light a bonfire of activity and passion for your brand. Yes, lovemarks, brand love, whatever you want to call it. YOU, blogger once were one of these brands, and could very well be again if only you'd extend a hand!

This ability to drive and adopted new standards, innovations and technologies makes you highly attractive, or would if you were alive, but you don't seem to be. Is there anyone in there? Gmail is doing this, this is certainly why people f'n love flickr. People also f'n love google maps. Sorry for the French, but "f'n love" is exactly the emphasis called for!

MediaRSS, podcasting, videoblogging, geotagging!, XFN, AJAX and the list goes on and on and on. You're market is EXPLODING! Where are you!?

My grandmother moves faster and she's been dead for 20 years! I've loved you blogger, why have you abandoned me?

-Mike of http://mmeiser.com/blog
An ungrateful blogger.

2 comments:

Michael Meiser said...

Yes, in fact the problem righted itself sometime this morning. My RSS reader suddenly regurgitated an entire weeks worth of posts in their entirity. Weird. Perhaps it was only a momentary glitch. Perhaps it was my horrible writing. But there's still something wonky going on with blogger. No explanation either. It's almost worse than having the problem, a phantom problem that comes and goes. Well, maybe it'll never appear again.

Michael Meiser said...

All I know is I thought it was a problem with feedburner, but I went and checked out my original atom feed and the problem was there. I'm nothing if not meticulous. :P