Today's Trifecta! - OpenID Support, Mobile and New Personalization Preferences

• OpenID - Bloglines Beta and Bloglines Classic will both support OpenID. Going forward we'll support consuming OpenID, OpenID 2.0 and are investigating the use of other Open Standards such as oAuth and APML.
• Mobile - Bloglines Beta now has a new version of Bloglines Mobile with additional features such as the "Start Page", "Pin" and improved browser support.
• New Personalization Preferences - Bloglines Beta has added several new personalization features as well as implementing support for the current feed reading personalization features.

We're going to keep the pace up and continue releasing features left and right.

Enjoy!!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

OpenID is now Open for Blogliners

Now our more technical users will know right way what's going on and will be excited. In that case, you can go to id.bloglines.com and get started. Note - OpenID is just the beginning of us working with true open standards. Other formats getting our attention include oAuth (Open Authentication) and APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language). For the rest of you, let me outline a little bit about OpenID and what it will offer you in the future.

OpenID allows you to create an identity online and use that identity to login to any OpenID supported site. In other words, you will no longer need to create a new username and password for every single website. How many times have you gone to a site and forgotten your login. You might ask yourself, was the username "joe578" or "joejoe" or "bigjoe" or "joeanne?"

Now you can imagine that if your favorite sites allowed you to login with a single ID you would be able combine services and create some pretty cool mashups. You would be able to pick and choose the sites you like to use and the features you want.

While OpenID is getting some momentum from major sites who have offered OpenIDs, it is still very early. So in the meantime, you will still need multiple IDs. But keep looking for the OpenID symbol. You will see it popping up more and more.

If you're looking to get better informed about OpenID you can check out the OpenID Foundation or a few of the bloggers who cover the topic.

• Identity Woman
• Simon Willison's Weblog
• David Recordon's Blog
• Identity 2.0 Europe
• Talking Web X.0

Enjoy!

- Rob Emanuele and the Bloglines Team

Bloglines Beta Goes Mobile

Bloglines has had a leading mobile feed reader for the last couple of years. It's always been one of our key product strengths. So we were really excited to make our mobile product even better. We were busy over the summer re-writing the mobile code from the ground up. A new version of mobile is available as part of the Bloglines Beta Releases. Go to m.beta.bloglines.com on your cell phone. When we feel it's ready, we'll make it available on Bloglines Classic. Key Features

• Start Page - Your Bloglines Start Page is displayed at the top of the screen. This way you can pull your favorite feeds to the top.
• Pin (formerly known as Keep New) - Sometimes you want to save that special post to read later when you're not on the go.
• Pagination - Instead of loading all of your posts, we parse out the posts into smaller bundles to fit into the memory constraints of cell phone browser. This has numerous benefits including improved speed, better reliability and safer "mark read" behavior.

Enjoy!

- Kelvin Nishikawa and the Bloglines Team

Personalization Preferences

• Mark Individual Posts as Read - You can now choose between Bloglines Classic or Bloglines Beta mark read behavior. You can either mark individual posts as read or mark the entire folder as read.  The current default is to mark individual feeds read. We'll continue to monitor the comments around this setting closely. We know this is very important to our long-time Blogliners. In addition, I want to thank those who gave us feedback commented in the forums or posted on the web. Note - we want to make sure the people who have stood by Bloglines continue to do so. So we're listening to you all.
• Remember View - Many people like to have a single view across all of their feeds.  This way there is consistency for feed reading. However, some have discovered the beauty of selecting different views for different feeds. For example, many like to read feeds with lots posts in quick view whereas comic feeds look better in Full View.  To each his own. The current default is to have all feeds stick with one view.
• Use Feed CSS - CSS Support can be turned on or off. CSS means we will deliver the feed in the style as defined by the publisher. The current default is to have CSS Support on.

What's Old?

• Phone and Mobile settings - Fine tune your experience to make the most when you're on the go.
• User settings such as creating a user name which is necessary to establish an OpenID with Bloglines
• Change email and password.

Now Something a little Different

• Sort Oldest/Sort Newest - You'll notice this no longer a global preference available from the settings page. Now when you click sort Oldest/Sort News is changes the sorting view for all feeds.

We appreciate all the support you've given us over the years.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

CSS Support for Feeds

Last night, we released support for publisher defined style-sheets. This means going forward Bloglines will display publisher created CSS (cascading style-sheets) in the main reading views.

Why Do Publishers use CSS?

Most publishers use CSS to ensure content is designed consistently across browsers. If the publisher uses CSS in their feed, you'll see the publishers style-sheet.

What does this mean for me?

You'll see the content as the publisher designed it. A good example brought to our attention is the use of the "float" tag. Many bloggers use this tag to wrap text around an image. In the past, we wouldn't wrap the text around the image. Now we do. There are lots of other examples of how the content will be displayed a little differently. A full list of all of the CSS style attributes we support is located here.

For the most part everyone, will benefit because most publishers attempt to make their feeds readable for feed readers.  In addition, we figure that the people who track a few of their friends' feeds will probably like to see more for their friends "style" in their feed reader.  However, some publishers might make stylistic decisions which might make it hard for people to scan content quickly (small grey typeface on a black-background). That's why we built an option to turn this CSS Support off. If the publisher's design style is making it hard for you to scan and read your feeds, just to go Account Settings, Feed Options and turn off the CSS Support.

We want our Blogliners and bloggers to be happy.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

PS: If this text is blue then your reader supports CSS.

Bloglines Beta 1.0.2 - Listening to Blogliners; Edit Feeds and Folder for Beta

The latest launch offers up Inline Editing of Feeds and Folders. We pushed it out last night.  It looks like we were caught by Nathan Weinberg. Here's a quick summary.

Inline Edit Feeds and Folders - You can change the feed or folder title name and set individual feed/folder settings such as display updated items, display in Bloglines notifier, display in Bloglines Mobile and of course set your privacy settings for your feed or folder.   See screenshot below.

You might ask, "What does it mean to set my privacy settings for a feed or folder?" If you have your settings as public, your feed library is available to the world. Here's an example of a part of my feed library so you can see what I read.

The next set of releases will feature personalization preferences including:

• New preferences allowing you to select different read/unread modes (Classic or Beta)
• Bloglines Mobile
• "Clippings" which will be renamed "Saved."

We'll keep you posted as we get closer.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

The Latest Construction on Bloglines Beta 1.01. - Pin, Send Email, Help and Hotkeys

Source cohdra

Last week we launched our beta site and it looks like many of you noticed. The overall response was exceptionally favorable, but one topic was lost in the excitement: the site is still under construction! Many people thought we were done. On the other hand, a number of our classic Blogliners pointed out several of their favorite features missing or not implemented quite right.  Both parties are right. If the beta currently fulfills your needs, great move right in. If it doesn't fulfill your needs right now, don't fret, we still have a large number of features to implement and a few features to refine. Take your time.

We've been listening to our core users and rolled out several features from Bloglines Classic which were frequently requested by our Blogliners. Keep an eye out for these new icons:

	Keep as New - retitled "Pin" - This feature temporarily saves a post in the reading view.  It's very useful for when you see a large post, but don't have enough time to read the post.
	Email this - One of the great things about a feed reader is sharing all of the great posts you discover.  Click on the email button at the bottom of a post and you can send those especially interesting posts to a friend.

We've also implemented a couple of other features available in the current site.

	Help - We've implemented a dynamic help site using Right Now Technologies. It'll allows us to create help articles on the fly. We're also going to experiment with pointing out to great help content created by our user community. So if we see a great tutorial someone has written, we just might link to you.
	Hotkeys - The majority of hotkeys are working: "j" - advance forward in the reading view "k" - move backwards in the reading view "r" - refresh left pane "s" - advance to the next feed "f" - advance to the next folder "A" - mark your selected feed or folder as read "n" - toggle Pin - different in Classic "o" - open article in new window - different in Classic

I've included a couple of screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

We'll continue to listen to Blogliners in the forums and across the web. Our next set of features we're working on will include editing feed subscription preferences and creation of additional beta preferences that will allow you to configure the beta to handle read/unread posts just like in classic Bloglines.

We'll keep you all posted as we get closer. Again thanks for the feedback.

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team.

Bloggers Cheer Bloglines Beta Release

Photo Courtesy of StockVault

Wow! We were a little overwhelmed by the positive response our Beta received earlier in the week. We expected a few in the tech-set to write reviews, but never imagined the out-pouring of excitement. I thought I would share some of the high-points.

• Read Write/Web did an exceptionally detailed review and here's a little except, "Bloglines has me back as a fan!"
• Even the competition likes Blogline Beta. Chris Wetherall of Google Reader described Bloglines as, "Wicked Cool."
• 3,000 posts were written across the web. Most of these from Blogliners excited about the return of Bloglines.  I love you Blogliners!
• Lots of people were and continue to discuss future releases of Bloglines in our Forums.

But we also wanted you to know that we heard another message---Don't take too long to release additional features!

We'll be listening to you and announcing additional features going forward. In fact, our next feature slated for release is "Keep as New." This was the single most-requested item from active Blogliners. We're working on it right now. We'll keep you posted on this and other releases as we get closer.

Cheers!

Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Bloglines Beta - Now Open to the Public

Blogliners we're proud to introduce a beta of our latest redesign of Bloglines. Our About Beta overview outlines the key features a personalizable home page, 3 reading-views and drag-and-drop foldering in an Ajax interface. We're inviting you, the Bloglines fans, to the new Bloglines beta in the redesign cycle to provide us feedback. We look forward meeting you in the forums or at conferences to brainstorm on ways to make Bloglines an even better feed reader.

The current Beta is available for Firefox and IE 7 browsers. Of course, the full-featured original Bloglines will still be available during the Beta period.

Enjoy!

- The Bloglines Team

Meets, Greets, and Feeds at Gnomedex

Picture by Brian Solis.

You know a conference is going to be good when the first person you run into is one of your power users. For Gnomedex 2007, my first conference as the new GM of Bloglines, I hoped to meet many Bloglines fans, and sure enough, I wasn't disappointed. Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, who says his second most important thing in life is Bloglines, got me started off in style We chatted and he told me some of his favorite features and the way he uses Bloglines. He likes the hack by John Hicks for a Mac-like interface.

Later in the day, I got to meet Stan James, Founder and CTO of Lijit. Friends told me to be sure to talk to him. He's a bit of a wunderkind who got VC interest in his PHD dissertation. Also, he's a big fan of Bloglines and has been analyzing public Bloglines data and talking with other researchers for a while now.

On Saturday, I was spacing out for a moment when I noticed the person in front of me scanning through loads of feeds at lightspeed. Once I noticed the Bloglines logo, I knew we had to chat. It turned out to be Arieanna Schweber, a long-time Bloglines user. We chatted for a bit and she pointed out a few things she would like to enhance in the future. She also works at B5 who is looking to hire bloggers.

I've been busy the last couple of months working with the team to define our next major releases. We've been talking to Blogliners and charting the next generation version of feed readers. I look forward to meeting all of the big fans of Bloglines at future conferences and of course in our user forums.

We'll keep you posted on key events going forward. We can't wait to show you what we've been working on.

Cheers.

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team