Feedster is like that long lost cousin showing up at the party. Today, cousin Feedster showed up with a new paint job. Unfortunately the car seems to be missing the hubcaps, a bumper, a rearview mirror and an all important second gear.

Alan Graham, Feedster’s Community Liason posts about the new look with a title exclaiming “new features!” and his words focus on speed and ‘coming soon’:

A lot of the changes you won’t see, but will feel when you try out the new Feedster. Its not easy to shave off fractions of a second, but we’ve done that and more to make sure that we can continue to provide timely results to you even while the Blogosphere continues to grow at a remarkable rate.

I’m glad to see them going for a leaner, meaner Feedster. Most of the features/functionality they had before I didn’t use anyway. The only thing I really care about when it comes to Feedster and Technorati are the search results.

Graham hints that the missing features will (possibly?) be coming back in better form and I hope they don’t. Spend the time on making the search results sing and be splog-free, that’s what I care about at Feedster. Feature bloat sucks and their competitor Technorati has become about so many different things that they seem to have lost their focus. Feedster was falling into that trap too and maybe now with this new design they’ll concentrate on doing one thing extremely well instead of a bunch of things not very well.

Sometimes it’s smart to say “enough already!” and go back to the drawing board. I wish Microsoft would do this with Word. It’s ridiculous that any Word processing program has become so bloated.

Randy Charles Morin wonders where the “Features!” are (emphasis mine): “Lot’s of removed features; MyFeedster, link search, FeedFinder. I don’t see anything new. Still on life support?”

Morin’s parting comment references Jeremy Zawodny’s prophetic vision that Feedster would be done by year end 2006.

I tried some searches to see if there were visible signs of forks in them yet.

Same as the old boss?
Graham claims a lot of features you will “feel” by using the search. When I did a search for http://www.makeyougohmm.com/ I was returned the standard Apache 404 message instead of an equally clean “no results found.” Next, I tried putting in only the domain ‘makeyougohmm.com’ and received a cleaner “no results” message.

My feeling? Disappointed.

Come on, Feedster, don’t you think folks will do vanity searches for their own domains? I know there are search results — and should be — for my domain. Fix this, please.

A search for “TDavid” revealed 55 results and unlike before where I’d find my own results often mixed in, this time the first few results were legitimate fresh responses (within the last couple hours) and then, there they were:

Two splog entries. Ouch again. Fix this.

A few more results down revealed that megite, a memeorandum clone, had linked to one of my posts and when I clicked through from the feedster results instead of going to the megite listing, I went to a separate feedster search page? Huh? When I click on what I think should take me to a site, that’s where I want to go, not to some onsite summary page. What good is that?

Maybe today I’m being extra impatient, but this did it for me. How many test searches will one burn before giving up? I do like the new paint, Feedster, but the car seems to have left the shop prematurely.

Hopefully other results are better than mine. We’re yours better than mine?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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