Digg ReaderI woke up this morning to an invitation to join Digg Reader. OK, I confess I did wait until after breakfast to try it out. (Does that make me a bad tech blogger? Or just a hungry one?)

Too bad I waited. Apparently all the folks who either don’t sleep or don’t need to eat got in first and broke it. I signed in, authorized Digg to grab my feeds and was presented with a (boring) screen like this.

Note Nate’s article (last one on the list). He agrees with me.

Obviously, my first impression was that I didn’t like the color scheme or layout. Not that Feedly’s green is my favorite, but I do like the look of Feedly a bit better.

Well, this is a reader application, right? So I should be able to read something. Nope. I can’t open a single article. I’ve tried every kind of click my mouse and keyboard could manage. Knowing that Nate at The Digital Reader was awake, I commented on his post to ask him how he managed to open articles. Maybe there was some trick only non-sleeping and -eating techies knew?

Again, nope. He said he just clicked on them and they opened. He also said he was noticing it getting slower as more people logged on and increased the load on their servers.

Well, I’m glad that I’m not a completely clueless idiot. But a service that can’t survive a few hours with an increasing load definitely isn’t ready for prime time.

Back to Feedly, which ain’t pretty, but it does work. I’ll give Digg a few hours and try them again.

NO COMMENTS

  1. Hey Juli — I’m sorry to hear you had issues with Digg Reader. We’re working hard to make sure our app is working on as many platforms as possible and hope to get these issues fixed as quickly as we can.

    Which OS / browser were you using? And did expanded view work (in the top nav)? Any and all feedback you can provide can help us make a better product. And we really want to make a great product.

    Thanks!

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