Bloglines got a much needed band-aid this weekend that fixed the feed update problem that has plagued users for weeks and caused long-gone founder Mark Fletcher to write “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.”
In our continued testing we see all of our feeds now updating regularly on both the default and beta versions of the site.
But we’ve also heard that the service has been up for sale throughout this last summer, with no serious bidders so far (Microsoft and Newsgator may have had a passing interest). Bloglines was originally acquired in February 2005 for around $10 million, and our understanding is that Ask isn’t necessarily even looking for a break-even sale.
The Bloglines team is currently led by GM Eric Engleman, who we’ve heard has been doing a “heroic job” despite prolonged resource starvation by the parent company. Google Reader probably has 2-3x the number of engineers working on the product that Engleman has under him.
The reason that Bloglines has become the unwanted stepchild at Ask? It drives next to no revenue, and it’s excellent blog search engine has become less strategically important as Ask.com defocuses on competitive search.
It might be time to dust off that resume, Eric.
I just do not understand why big companies acquire these great services then drive them down to the shitter! For instance, do you remember WiseNut.com? LookSmart purchased that great serach engine and then completely destroyed it. Why?!?!?!??!
Sometimes they buy the company for the IP or the people. It’s not always soley because of the product. Sometimes they even buy companies because then they don’t have to compete with them in the future. Now, this is on a much larger scale, but Google basically bought YouTube so they wouldn’t have to compete with them.
Sometimes they make the right decision, sometimes not so much. Whatever the case, Bloglines is dead. It’s game over man, game over!
Some things are better done by small companies than by big ones. So the idea may be great and the intentions good, but the outcome may still suck.
10 million
someones needs to be fired asap
Wow, that is a tiny amount for a formerly great product. Why can’t they just insert ads into the feeds in an unobtrusive way? I don’t think they have them now, at least not in my feeds from what I see. It was only a year ago that it peaked in popularity.
I believe it’s hard for bloglines to compete with google reader. and this “incident” just make it worse
There’s NO money in RSS.
That is perfectly right. Do people expect to make money from the feed syndication? No. If you don’t offer it for free, someone else will. How else can you make money? Ads? On your main website? You only go there to set up your syndication. Then, that’s it. Barely any visits any more. If you start putting ads in the feeds, people will jump off your wagon as if it was flaming. And you will crash and burn.
Bloglines Beta rocks.
Bloglines finally seems to have gone off track completely now. I had used it for the best part of four years, but finally, in the last few weeks, switched to Google Reader after tiring of another Bloglines technical failure.
Can’t say I’m surprised it’s up for sale. It was an RSS pioneer, but it’s been standing still for years now.
It’s too late for Bloglines. Many users have already switched over to Google Reader. My bet is that this is heading for Deadpool.
blogs are not dead. I love Tech crunch
http://kizkscra...s.blogspot.com/
*IF* Yahoo could get a bargain price on it, would it make sense for them to acquire Bloglines? While the My Yahoo homepage is nice, it is hardly a feed reader. Would they be able to somehow integrate Bloglines perhaps even into their Yahoo Mail interface? It would be a serious competitor to Google Reader as the Bloglines Beta rocks.
What about Automattic? Or Six Apart? I’m thinking Automattic could combine it into WordPress.com.
The beta is fantastic. Someone should buy it and throw some engineers at it. Ready-made traffice and a front to a blog search.
Google should not have Not Have Monopoly Control Over RSS Readers.
I’m an feed junky and last year when I could not find a reader other than googles that had the features I wanted, I decided to build one that matched and bettered the google reader feature set
At adelph.us we love to read rss feeds and we thought it would be a great idea to integrate a full featured rss/atom feed reader into the adelph.us social communication platform. We looked at some of the available feed readers and while many of them are very good, most lacked some key features that we believe are needed to help members easily add, read, and recycle feeds. At adelph.us we believe that there should be more than one choice for internet users when it comes to key applications like feed readers. We think that a feed reader should be tightly integrated into a unified social communication platform that allows members to use all of the features with one log or openid.
We believe in the Open Source development community, and because of this in the near future we will be releasing the adelph.us reader under an Open Source license. This means that the adelph.us reader will continue to evolve to meet the needs of users and developers.The adelph.us reader has all of the features that you would expect in a top of the line feed reader. When we started the development process we wanted to make sure that we matched feature for feature with the best feed readers. Once we had the key features list we began to add new features that would make the adelph.us feed reader an easy to use aggregator that gives members the ability to read, share, and republish feeds.
Some adelph.us Reader Features
* Feed Reader tightly integrated into adelph.us social communication platform
* Easy to use and intuitive user interface
* Add feeds from an existing OPML file
* Add rss/atom feeds as well as feeds from existing social services
* Share feed items with a note ( Public, Private, Friend (s), Group(s) )
* Email feed items with a note
* Tag feed item
* Re Publish feed item to blog
* Re Publish entire feed to blog
* Tabbed feed viewing
* Feed viewing options (Bottom, Right, Hide)
* Integrated feed search
* Feed Categorization using tags
* Latest feeds section (Shows feeds from the last 1 hour, 2 hours, 5 hours)
That’s so sad… I heart bloglines … it rules!
I think Blogline is slowly losing market shares to Google in blog rss feeds.
I wonder if anyone can provide some actual data on this trend.
This only shows that IAC has too many products which it can’t manage. There must have been a business plan when they got Bloglines in the first place. Integrating this with ASK may have been an option as well. Basically a lack of vision, no wonder Google has banished this web 1.0 company into oblivion.
Telling someone to dust off the resume is a bit cocky huh ? The guy is doing a good job. Support is what he & his team needs not posts like that.