Not all Ajax goodness is good

Bloglines, long my RSS reader of choice, should either just adopt its long-running "new" beta service as its main production service, or fix up the "old" service it still offers as its default.

The default Bloglines service seems increasingly buggy. Case in point: When trying to move feeds around among my folders today, I got thrown into some kind of error loop involving the Ajax implementation. This kind of thing happens way too often.

The error dialog, as you can see, hardly helps. (If you're browsing this site without graphics, here's the text of the dialog: "error loading data for tree: undefined => XMLHttpTransport Error 0.") Click "OK" and it just comes back, over and over again. Finally I abandoned the effort and closed the browser. My folder changes did not stick.

Unfortunately, I have to be careful what I wish for. Though I imagine most or all of Bloglines' programming energy goes into buttoning down the beta software, honestly, I've tried that new interface and just don't like it as well. It seems harder, with more steps, to mark items as read. The colors may be more attractive, but I find the text a bit harder to read.

So if Bloglines does turn the beta into its default service, I'm hosed. If it doesn't, I'm hosed trying to use the buggy old one.

As a contrast, I give props to Yahoo! for one clever redesign trick, as seen in its Mail and My Yahoo! services: keep the old version available (and maintained!) as a "classic" mode for people who have whatever quirky reasons for just liking it better. Perhaps that's all the Bloglines folks are doing, except in reverse: keep the new version as a "permanent beta" (Gmail, anyone?) and the old version as a default.