How to Start Your Service With a Bang: Defeating Lock-in

There’s a bit of blogging buzz around the fact that Bloglet is having reliability problems and that their support emails are bouncing. Bloglet is a service that allows readers to subscribe to email updates of your blog. Until a few days ago I was using them, but I’ve just switched to FeedBlitz. Lucky for me I only have a handful of email subscribers since my blog is but a few months old and most of my audience uses RSS readers. But some people, like this guy, have 1000 email subscribers. Ouch.

So although it’s a no-brainer to make the decision to switch, the real problem is how to extract your data from the existing service. The only way to do it is to manually copy/paste the data page by page from the HTML (all 50 pages of it). Yuck.

The smartest thing FeedBlitz has done is include an “Import from Bloglet” tool that extracts all of your current subscribed email addresses from Bloglet. This is essentially what Microsoft did in the early 90s when they launched Excel by including the ability to read Lotus 123 files. And we all know how that one turned out.

Bravo for FeedBlitz for a well-executed coup.

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