Last week's Typepad outage was frustrating to many, myself included. Some Six Apart cheerleaders have compared Typepad's problems to those of Bloglines, del.icio.us and Technorati, and implied that users have their expectations set too high. I don't like that comparison because though practically essential to me, I don't yet pay a fee for those sites. With Typepad I do expect that it will work because I pay for it and at least some of the subscription fees should go toward improving the infrastructure.
That said, Bloglines is a tool that I use quite heavily* and I'm hoping that their maintenance today will fix some of the issues with missing and slow updates. If it doesn't, I am going to follow Enchanting Juno's example and switch using Subway Knitter's great step by step instructions on exporting your feeds from Bloglines and importing them into NewsGator.
12/20/2005 Update: Woo hoo! Bloglines and del.icio.us are back. Here's a good post on the Typepad situation.
*Yes, I know I probably should have switched long ago. Blame it on inertia.
it IS tough to not complain when service that you pay for goes missing. have they said whether they would refund you or not? i know that's no consolation but it would be nice. and it may not be the same as del.icio.us (my del.icio.us account has been missing for over a day now!!! ARGH!!) to the end user but it's the same company-wise. they've all grown so fast that they busted out of their molds!
you could always strike out on your own like subwayknitter :)
Posted by: gleek | December 19, 2005 at 14:15
Yeah, I'm with you on the delicious outage. It's frustrating. I had a bunch of christmas ideas saved in mine. Let's hope it comes back up soon.
There hasn't been anything posted about compensation from Typepad yet (that I've seen). We'll see what happens there. At least I don't use my knit blog as a source of income like a lot of bloggers do. I've been using typepad for my knit blog because I've had my own (non-blog) sites for years and just wanted this one to be totally brainless. It's sort of freeing to not have to think about any of the technical aspects of the site.
I am a bit disappointed because I planned to use Typepad to host a site I'm building for a friend's show. It seemed ideal because the interface is so user friendly. With these outages, I obviously no longer feel comfortable doing that. I guess I'll have to look into other hosted CMS solutions.
Posted by: Amy | December 19, 2005 at 14:33
The typepad outtage was very annoying, and I'm not even a user. Blogger totally sucks too for other reasons...I'm too lazy to switch at this point. Thanks for the tip re. Newsgator...we'll see if Bloglines improves!
Posted by: Melissa | December 19, 2005 at 14:50
I have to admit that I don't get too hot under the collar when LiveJournal goes dead, mainly because it rarely does, and second, I pay next to nothing for my account. Actually, I do lots of volunteer work for them, so my paid account is "free".
I host my blog on my own hosting account with dreamhost using Wordpress, which I like much better than Moveable Type. Its an expensive way to go though - I pay a little over 100 dollars a year for far more features and bandwidth than I'll ever need. Which is why I'm always offering to host blogs and whatever, just so I don't feel so wasteful. :)
Posted by: Gail | December 22, 2005 at 11:27