Stick-to-it-ness
A bit of quasi-coherent quasi-incoherent rambling on this gorgeous Friday afternoon.
Years ago, I used Mozilla as my browser. Then it became apparent that IE was the better browser, so I switched to it. Ultimately, IE stagnated for a number of years, and I switched to Firefox. The fact that IE is now getting attention isn’t enough to get me to switch back.
For a number of years, I used Bloglines. Then it became apparent that it was stagnating, so I switched to Planet. The fact that Bloglines is now getting attention isn’t yet enough to get me to switch back.
What started as a small list of Atom 1.0 feeds that Bloglines couldn’t at the time handle well, has remained a rather exclusive list of Atom 1.0 feeds. They are not all perfect. But like most people, I can’t keep up with everybody I want to, and being able to either select a tool or being inclined and able to install a template or plugin that produce an Atom 1.0 feed has proven to be a reasonable — not perfect, but reasonable — clewfulness filter for me.
By now, my planet is much more to me than Bloglines ever was. It was visited by 738 unique IP addresses in the past week. This isn’t a large number. But the Atom feed it produced has been fetched by 160 unique IP addresses. It is this number that amazes me.
Despite the quick dismisal by Mr. Techmeme himself, I’ve found that I’ve grown increasingly fond of the MeMeme display in the top left. If you compare what you see there against what you see on Techmeme, you will see that there is a diversity in the tech world that Techmeme doesn’t quite capture.
If Bloglines is still hiring, I’d suggest that they look for someone who is looking to enable each user to build their own communities. I know Bloglines has the technical talent to pull this off.
It is in this context that I read the tale of apparent Shangri-La at Google. For well over a year, I’ve been told of massive rewrite is underway which will complete in a number of weeks and solve a number of Blogger issues. I’ve looked into using code.google.com for an effort that is underway, but I’ve now reconsidered due to the concern that it is entwined into this herculean rewrite and the people now working on it may chose to move on any time.