Popping the Bubbler

Five Across, which is headed by the guy that headed the teams that created iPhoto and iMovie, launched a new blogging system today, called bubbler™. It’s available for Mac OS X and Windows.

I took it for a spin. You can read my Bubbler test blog to see my discoveries, but the bottom line:

  1. No permalinks (at least, not ones that are exposed)
  2. No good way to create hyperlinks (other than pasting the naked URL into the post)
  3. No ability to add an image inside a post
  4. No RSS feeds. Or Atom feeds. No syndication feeds at all

Summary: This isn’t a blogging tool. It’s a nice home page builder.

That said, I do like the reporter feature, a streamlined UI to create postings that are automatically datestamped—awfully handy if you liveblog. And of course, this is beta one. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here.