23 April 2008 - 12:47Pinned

Like many other people I use a Bloglines for reading various RSS feeds to which I am subscribed. Bloglines has a pretty nifty feature, it lets you pin various items in an RSS feed so that you can re-visit them later. Pretty nifty, and I use it a lot.

Except that I find right now that I am pinned to Bloglines. Let me explain.
Any feed reader lets you export your OPML file which contains your feeds grouped into categorie and this feature pretty much lets you travel from feed reader to feed reader without many headaches. No feed reader would take its users hostage by refusing to export their OPML file because every user will refuse to be taken hostage in such a way.
However, if you use Bloglines’ pin feature a lot you will find yourself hostage to Bloglines because you cannot export the items that you have pinned and leaving Bloglines would also mean leaving behind the items that you have pinned and that are probably important to you. You cannot export these pinned items typically because this is a feature which is not widely-used by other feed readers and when it is used by other feed readers it is implemented in a variety of flavors which makes its export inefficient.

So I would say that I pretty much taken hostage by a feature. A niche feature, which makes a pretty interesting case for niche products: if you manage to get your user to create data while using your niche product, chances are that your user will be hostage to the data that it created and the feature consuming this data because this data cannot be exported easily to your competitors’ services. Pretty interesting…
P.S. Initially when I started pinning items on Bloglines I realized that I will be taken hostage to this feature and I thought about bookmarking them on del.icio.us. But I decided that I am too lazy for this. So I guess I’ll have to use Bloglines for quite a while…