6 August 2008 - 17:01An unsual single point of failure

Today when I went to check my RSS feeds on bloglines I was presented with the following:

Quickly I realized that I was cut-off from any source of information that I use because I access sites mostly thru their RSS feeds and my RSS feed reader was down. It was out of the question to go to those sites and read the news from their homepage (*) because those sites (BW, FT, Forbes,, Le Monde, infoq, etc…) have tons of content and I would not be able to navigate it in order to find what I like (this was what my RSS feeds were doing).
It was a pretty weird feeling to see how underlined how dependent I am on my feed reader and that my feed reader has become a single point of failure in my contact with various content providers. Take bloglines out and I am pretty much out of contact with pretty much anything I am following. And I don’t think that I can do much about it (**).
I can only hope that they come back up quickly…

* BTW, for a pretty interesting analysis oh how RSS changes browsing patterns please check out this post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. The concept that “any page is a homepage” due to the various channels which are sending users to that page will change a few things in the content publishing business.

** Actually I could turn to my Google reader account to read the feeds from there, but this would mean that I need to update the OPML of my Google account, determine what stories are new and which ones I have read, etc… I could get past this single point of failure, but there are costs associated with it. Strangely enough, using Google reader as a replacement for Bloglines is similar to some work-arounds used for avoiding single points of failures in enterprise systems (synchronizing redundant machines).