If you were a Bloglines user, consider yourself old school. Most people moved on to Google Reader long ago, and then bailed on RSS entirely for the Real Time Gang (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.).
The once-great feed reader, bought by IAC in February 2005 for around $10 million, has been on life support for a couple of years now.
A two year old beta site with new features remains in beta and has never been launched on the main domain name. A band aid was put on the problems the service had a year ago, but not a single new feature of note has launched since then.
Repeated attempts to sell the service for next to nothing went nowhere. And recently, we’ve heard, IAC strongly considered simply shutting it down. The team ultimately decided not to, but they are clearly looking for a long term home for the project.
Competitor Newsgator recently threw in the towel and suggested users port their feeds over to Google Reader.
Something interesting needs to happen at Bloglines at a product level, or they will, inevitably, be deadpooled.
thats too bad for bloglines
I think google reader is huge, thats why other feed readers are closing one by one. Since it sports domain google.com/reader that is same as google.com search, website traffic can not be monitored by third party like comscore.
Once they were bought, they stopped innovating. The same happened to most of the other feed readers. The business never moved beyond syndication of basic text and podcasts. It should have evolved into a general mechanism for the distribution of structured data and building the platform for a large variety of distributed applications…
See: http://bob.wyma...hodder_poi.html
bob wyman
One has to admit professionalism and perseverance pays in the long run http://www.thessayist.com is an excellent aide for your academic needs.
Would you mind stopping your pointless spam of these comments? For the record, your site looks ridiculous, starts speaking without you having to click anything first (somewhat disconcerting) and the copy for the front page is so badly presented as to put me off reading more than the first few lines.
Your pathetic attempt to merge “The” and “Essayist” in your URL and twitter is just pointless. And you are helping people to cheat at exams, which is utterly shameful. And as for being associated with Oxbridge, you only serve to degrade the good name of those two highly-respected universities. I hope you’re happy.
In summary, shut up unless you have some non-marketing, on-topic opinion to write.
Isaac
PS. Holly McBain is also posting irrelevant links to your site, along side good comments. Nice try to get your PageRank up.
Further to this, it seems Holly McBain is your PR director and “with an MBA Holly is proficient (in) … SEO”. I think not. Links on TechCrunch comments have rel=”nofollow”, so search engines don’t use them for PageRank. And off-topic comments are unlikely to have their links clicked.
I also note that Oxbridge Researchers is just an academic-sounding name for a Limited company.
End of rant (for now).
Isaac
Although, we COULD backlink him into oblivion.
Spamming doesn’t pay in the long run.
Could someone update the spam filter to remove all posts referencing thessayist.com? This is getting bothersome.
For the record, my circle of peers still relies heavily on google reader for information aggregating and, importantly, sharing. I haven’t noticed the mass migration toward twitter that the TC writers seem to be taking for granted.
i put them in the spam filter.
To me Bloglines is long dead, I’ve tried to contact them on mutliple occasions to have my account removed last December, of all my requests (not only to the bloglines team, but IAC as well) I never received an answer, I even got messages that it couldn’t process my mail. See my attempts here: http://arminus....s-is-fucked.php
Not only that, but three-pane RSS has been dead for at least a few years.
I get the impression many publishers are losing interest with RSS too – that’s a pity it’s a far better way of managing the daily news firehose than watching tweets.
that’s a bit odd, indeed, but i guess after the whole twitter fad goes away, they ‘ll be back to it. i find google reader to be the best way to browse news on the iphone
anyway how can you manage tweets if you are not using RSS to subscribe to keyword searches ?
How about micro.bloglines as a twitter/FB/various other real time feeds client of some sort. I appreciate it’s a busy space, but they could apply something new I’m sure, or just have their brand behind it. Perhaps even integrate the real time stuff with the RSS stuff.
Good reminder – I have been meaning to move over to Google Reader for a while. Importing Bloglines’ OPML into Google REader is not straightforward (had to remove all folders as GR seem to ignore feeds within them), but doable.
Not to happy with yet more personal info being accessible by Google, but there’s no easy alternative.
I had tried Bloglines for few weeks (both the normal and the beta version). Beta version is good, but not as good as the Google Reader. But my favourite combination is NetNewsWire (desktop and iPhone) synced with Google Reader (online).
I never really joined the Twitter bandwagon. Not that I find it annoying. I am afraid I may get addicted (like I am to the RSS feeds)!
That there are more Facebook and Twitter users than Google Reader users, that’s certainly true. But I don’t think GR users have “left” for those services. Indeed, I’m noticing an uptick in GR users.
Sometimes, you technology blogs live in your own world. I keep seeing RSS is dead, RSS is dead. Outside of technology sites, there are plenty of sites that you couldn’t follow on twitter or facebook if you wanted to. If you follow ANYTHING else besides technology, you would be out of luck with just twitter, facebook, as many sites don’t even offer the option.
RSS is alive and well, and will be for sometime. I’m not sure why the technology blogs keep trying to push that RSS is dead theme down our throats.
I second.
Third!
I used Bloglines for months and really liked the beta, but after nagging system errors and slowdowns, moved everything to GR.
Funny… I don’t see anything in the article insisting RSS is dead.
I think the product just hasnt evolved like it should have. Plus, it is hard to have a good online rss reader which isnt built around a big brand. Google has become a destination not just a site.
Social networking sites like twitter and facebook are dominating social bookmarking sites these days. Google reader alone is competing with them and I believe that many small RSS sites will be shutting down in near future.
They will recreate or innovate something new.
I use both and I must say that Google must go a long way still to be as functional as bloglines.
With bloglines I can share all of my feeds (I am not speaking about beta just the plain product)
I can not do that with Google reader as easily
I work with Google reader but I share my links with Bloglines. I stopped using links when it was becoming too slow for 1000 plus feeds. Why so many feeds because it is my personal search engine.
The belsec.skynetblogs.be is an experiment in Open ITsecurity intelligence. But as a volunteer it mustn’t take too much time.
So let please bloglines stay
or Google reader let me share all of my feeds like bloglines with you
and another thing
If Google reader or bloglines integrates with diigo so I can backup in cache some of the articles, that would be very nice to have
and twitter ?
first twitter is a baby that can be brought down by a single botnet (to trust all my info on twitter would be madness)
secondly it is chaos because twitter is SMS and not a letter or directory
I think that after a few years I have found more or less my system
1000 feeds with google reader
of which interesting links go to diigo
and others on share with google reader
and from diigo while I am on it
I select those that afterwards go to netvibes
the startpage with all the most important links
and feeds
and than the really important stuff go on my blog
and that is send to twitter
for those that use it like RSS
It is not that there is too less RSS
there is not enough of it
and the alternative watchpages don’t work as nice as RSS
Len
In this real-time world where things are moving faster than ever, I’d like to recommend to discover real-time information at feedmil.com
i bet you would.
I agree with the commenters saying that real-time alone is not enough. RSS is and will continue to be an important source of information. For me the best player in RSS is Feedly, that combines an excellent feed reader based on Google Reader with real-time information pulled from Twitter, Friendfeed and others.
So innovation in that space is happening, you just need to check elsewhere.
Using Twitter to follow blogs and news is only of marginal use, since it requires *you* to be online, reading Twitter, 24/7. No, I don’t think RSS is going anywhere anytime soon.
You can search with the 10 of the most significant engines with a single click in favtabs’ realtime search. At the moment it seems to me that FriendFeed produces the best results. Just pick a very rare term (eg pick a new title from feedmyapp) and start a search for it.
So for real-time, I recommend http://favtabs.com/realtime
I read this story in the Bloglines beta this morning. I still use it because I like it’s simplicity. It really had the potential to be a great product…back then, but today it would need some significant upgrades to compete. Sad. Perhaps someone will read this story and swoop in to save it from the deadpool.
A couple of ex-Yahoo’ers ran that thing into the ground (kinda like Yahoo!).
Over the last two years, I have seen everyone I know migrate from Bloglines, but I still use it daily. I have exported my OPML and Im ready for the end, I have imported to Google reader and tried it a few times – even tried to force myself to use it assuming there must be something wrong with me for preferring Bloglines, but alas, even today, I prefer it and Im riding it out till the end….I feel sorry for Bloglines. I feel sorry for me. Someone get me a tissue. :’(
My sentiments to a T. I, too, prepare for the worst. Bloglines FTW, the “w” standing for “what”.
I also prefer Bloglines to Google Reader. It’s too bad Bloglines hasn’t found a way to be profitable; it’s a very nice design (I like the original much better than the “beta” though…)
I like bloglines. I’ve used it for years, have tried the beta but prefer the old style. I like the layout, have had very few issues with down time, find it easy to add feeds, edit and so on. A few comments here say “it hasn’t changed” – but I think that’s a good thing. Why change for the sake of it? I also use twitter, but RSS lets me catch up with news in my own time.
I have set up a google reader account with the same feeds that I use if bloglines isn’t responding, I think I’ve only used it twice.
I still use Bloglines. As far as RSS goes, I think rumors of it’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. RSS has just so many good uses, especially if you run websites or blogs. I don’t see it going anywhere until there is something better. And it’s not some proprietary messaging platform like Twitter. Lets put Twitter in it’s place. Yes it’s a Facebook killer (by forcing them to burn their war chest). No it’s not an RSS killer.
count on google to make life even more perfect