Web -2.0: Bloglet and FeedBlitz Competes in Providing Abysmally Poor Service

Bloglet and FeedBlitz are both free blog subscription by email service and they are equally horrible.

I use Bloglet to provide email subscription service from this blog. It is a free service. The best part ends there. You will never get any response when facing with problems in Bloglet. Nobody answers the emails. In fact all email to the given address bounces.
The service is buggy and often fails. When it fails it stops sending further emails till you manually re-enable it again. It is definitely not plug-and-forget type. It is rather plug-monitor-renable (ad-infinitum) and bitch-moan-giveup kind of service. The emails sent are often filled with several basic HTML errors. Overall the email looks pretty unprofessional. And they are not customizable.

So I tried FeedBlitz. It promises much:

You may have heard of - or even be using - Bloglet, perhaps the best known “blogmail” alternative to FeedBlitz. Bloglet has widely reported reliability problems, doesn’t work with FeedBurner, and also fails to deliver multiple feeds for a single user. As for support, emails to its founder bounce, and no news has been posted there since March of 2004. The lights are on (well, maybe), but nobody’s home.

It speaks of being professional quality.

Make no mistake. FeedBlitz is a professional-grade blog mail service. We intend to make a profit with our upcoming premium service offerings. And to make money we have to give you and your readers reliable service, quality solutions and total support.

I was hopeful that my problems are finally over. So I dutifully imported my blog readership from Bloglet to FeedBlitz. It displayed the available subscriptions but it forced me to individually import them. Each import required me to repeat the whole process from start including supplying the login & password for bloglet. I managed to import both my Simple Thoughts Blog and Computer Jobs Blog.

However it showed an error for each blog:

The feed URL could not be polled during the last attempt. Once the feed is back online, you must use the test icon to inform FeedBlitz. FeedBlitz will not poll feeds which are unavailable until they are restarted by you. Subscribers can still join.

The feed loads fine in my browser or any feed viewer. Also it validates fine with any validator. FeedBlitz fails to see that. And it doesn’t inform me why it fails. At least Bloglet gave some error messages.

When I updated the details for my computer jobs blog it simply ignores them Obviously it is triggering some error; it fails to report me any issues. It fails silently and repeatedly.

I never get its much promised emails. FeedBlitz talks about reliability etc. I fail to see any enterprise quality in their services. Your mileage may vary.

Interestingly the Dashboard says:
3 feeds are ok

When I try to preview the feed it shows me the layout with blank content in the middle.

After several attempts I was unable to use FeedBlitz. And I am a very persistent person.

At least Bloglet works when it works!

So my final score:
Bloglet: -5.0
FeedBlitz: -10.0

I was talking before about Web 2.0 services and gave examples of some high quality free Web 2.0 services. With a sad heart I nominate both Bloglet and FeedBlitz for Web -2.0 service (dis)honor.

Update: Subsequently I had good experience with FeedBlitz customer support. They also addressed some of my concerns with their product. Overall they shine in customer support in my experience.

It looks like I will have to develop something better myself.

PS. I am aware of a service which sends an email per entry. IMHO it is torturing my subscribers by sending too many emails. I am looking for services which sends at most one email per day summarizing all new posts on that day.