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AskJeeves Steps Into RSS with Bloglines Acquisiton
Sugarpimp writes "According to several sources, AskJeeves has stepped into the deep end of the blogging pool with an interesting acquisition. Bloglines is one of the premier RSS readers. Perhaps AskJeeves will be able to legitimize itself again in the crowded search market by integrating Bloglines into its suite of products."
Perhaps, this is step one in updating it's services. It's not nearly as effective as the other search engines.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Dear Bloglines Member:
Ask Jeeves has acquired Bloglines, and we're excited about becoming the newest member of their portfolio of web services. We view this as a huge step forward for Bloglines, and a chance to achieve our mission of making RSS news reading and blogging a part of everyone's internet experience. You can learn more about the transaction by reading our press release or reviewing our Frequently Asked Questions.
We want to assure you that the Bloglines service will continue to grow and thrive. Like other companies in the Ask Jeeves portfolio, we will operate as a standalone, separate service -- the Bloglines name will remain, as will our URL, www.bloglines.com. We will support our current features and services, so please continue to log in to Bloglines to search, subscribe, publish and share RSS news feeds and blogs. All users will continue to be governed by the Terms of Service you agreed to when you registered for Bloglines.
We have a great roadmap on how to integrate some of the many innovative technologies of Ask Jeeves, including its Teoma algorithmic search technology. As always, we will share news of our progress on our blog, Bloglines News. And we encourage you to participate in the conversation. Our users have been amazing help in guiding the evolution of Bloglines, and we hope you will continue to give us input so we can remain the gold standard in blogging, search, and news aggregation.
We understand you may have questions about the acquisition and we'll try to answer them all as best we can. Please continue to contact our customer service with your questions and comments.
Thanks for your loyalty, patience, encouragement and feedback throughout this exciting process.
All the best,
Mark Fletcher and the Bloglines Team
make a lot of cash by absusing lonley, too-much-time-have bloggers. I dont think Google Ads or similar is a good cash source. The only people make money on bloggers are portals/metablogs and so on.
Perhaps AskJeeves will be able to legitimize itself again in the crowded search market by integrating Bloglines into its suite of products."
Because nothing says "legitimate" like blog.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
Heres the official confirmtation
as in knowing my preferences... ie.. remember that I prefer NO BLOGS when I search for news.
Jeeves, what will happen when askjeeves goes out of business? link
Answer:
It Will Never Happen to Me
By Claudia Black. Only $6.29.
Amazon.com
Really.
Neither this, nor MyJeeves is going to make AskJeeves anything but the ass of the internet.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I was having a bad day with google, and I was getting really frustrated. I submitted:
/boot to mount by default on gentoo?"
:|
"How the fuck can I get
It came back with a bunch of pr0n because of the F word...mount probably didn't help either
How is acquiring a blog service in any way 'redeem' a search service? I don't use google because it has Picasa or Groups or anything. I use google because it has a no-frills, high quality search engine with a clean interface and relatively unobtrusive ads. I don't see AskJeeve's search engine as being anywhere near as good.
So in essence, was getting the blog service good for the company? Sure. Was it good for the reputation of the engine? Hell no.
Remeber when they had the highest IPO ever! It skyrocketed from like $5.00 to $130 in one day! Holy shit it must have been exciting working there at first assuming they gave away stock like everyone else. Anyone know what's it at now days? My guess is about $3.50. Maybe $5.00 but it cannot be anymore than that.
Man, I totaly forgot that place existed. Does anyone actually use it?
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Then how do you explain Ask Jeeves Kids??
In short, I think it's a good deal for Ask Jeeves. They're trying to compete with Google and Yahoo, and to do that they need to do something new. The user profiles Bloglines has would make a great tool for pricing Google AdWord-style text ads -- but the "oo" companies (G*gle and Yah*) don't have the same incentive to try something radically different. They're sticking with what works. Maybe by offering a richer profile to ad buyers, Ask Jeeves will be able to break into the search market more aggressively.
More in the full blog post.
Bloglines have confirmed it.
Announcement page
Press release
FAQ about acquisition
TechSutra
"If it's not on Google, it doesn't exist"
If anyone wants to give me a step-by-step for Bloglines that results in me actually being able to read anything I've subscribed to, and doesn't use marketing speak, I'd be most grateful. Probably.
Not only are they still around, but their market cap is one point four two billion dollars. That's over twice the market value of Netflix.
It's also over 10 times as much market value as VA Software. Which do you think is more likely to still be around in, say, 2015 -- Slashdot, or Ask Jeeves?
Too bad short selling is so risky...
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
This is good news. Ive been using Bloglines for sometime now and the aggregator feature makes for any other RSS tool available for download today. However, the blogging feature itself needs some dressing up to match competetion like Blogger.
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
Ambitious man, that Jeeves. According to a CNET report, About.com is now up for sale, and Ask Jeeves is one of the bidders. The intriguing element here is that Google is also one of the bidders, of About.com, that is. Here is the link to the article: http://news.com.com/Primedia%20puts%20About.com%20 up%20for%20sale/2100-1025_3-5566950.html?tag=nefd. top
Sun and Fun
http://blog.ask.com/2005/02/welcome_bloglin.html
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
Man, I had no idea Ask Jeeves was still around. It sucked way back, and probably will contintue to suck, and purchasing blogglines in no way of redeeming itself. I might be only one person with an oppinion, but when I read news, I want it to be just that, news not another worthless oppinion from another crazy dolt out there. If I want to hear someone ranting about the current headlines I go talk to a drunk. Not trying to troll here, I just see bloggers as a completely wortholess humans.
-My robotajem w kalhozie
I run about ten RSS feeds on my Firefox browser that run the day's headlines and whatnot from leading news outlets and niche content providers of interest to me.
I've tried some Blog RSS feeds, along with some other very-high-output feeds, and it strikes me as too damned much. RSS is great for something like Slashdot or The New York Times where there's an editor on the other end to hold back the content delivered to a sane amount, but the architecture (as in "really simply") of RSS, while certainly sufficently robust, just isn't well designed for a high volume of hits per feed. I feel like I've immediately OD'ed, badly, on information when I pull down the home feed for PRWeb.
The solution? I shitcanned the PRWeb feed, even though I spend a lot of time on their website. And that's the fix, right there. Continuing upon the example, PRWeb's homepage is much better suited to sifting through the zillions of things they update all of the time than an RSS feed. Might the same apply to bloglines?
Jon Green Cheyenne
Why can't we live with just one huge partition instead of complicating things?
Oh, and to be fair, I'm going to bash someone else too. I bought Asus A8V mobo yesterday. Nice going Asus - I had a lot of trouble installing Windows XP (no service packs), because you left out the floppy containing SATA Windows drivers. I had to use Knoppix to download the damn drivers, figure out what files the "makedisk.exe" utility would copy to the floppy if I had been able to run it and only after that I was able to install Windows XP and download all the service packs.
Yes. You heard it right. My fresh, pre-service packs Windows installation was exposed to the internet with no firewalls at all during the installation. I've never had any problems before and didn't have any now.
The official press release at Bloglines.
Bloglines Confirms: AskJeeves is dead.
Yes, the rumors are true and we're all really excited. Now that that is out of the way, I'll try to answer some questions.
We'll have a lot more resources available to us. For example, we'll be integrating Ask's killer Teoma search engine technology within Bloglines. This will vastly improve our blog search capabilities. We don't think that world-class blog search exists yet; with Teoma and Bloglines that will happen.
Since we launched in June 2003, we've had an organic growth policy, both for the web site and for the company. And that's worked very well for us. Over the past year and a half, we've had many conversations with several great VC firms about funding Bloglines. We've also had conversations with many companies about acquiring Bloglines. We've been in a very fortunate position where we did not have to take any money, and we turned down all offers. But Ask Jeeves was different than the others that approached us. They wanted us to continue to run Bloglines as a stand-alone property, and also integrate Bloglines into their other properties where it made sense. And they were willing to commit a lot of resources to Bloglines to help us expand our features and capabilities. Just as important, it was clear from day one that the Ask team understood us, and our service. In fact, many of the execs at Ask Jeeves were already addicted Bloglines users. More subjectively, we thought they had much more of the start-up/fast moving mentality than any of the other companies we talked with, and that approach made them feel like the right partner for us.
Speaking from experience, I know that the acquisition of a service that you use and depend upon can be unnerving. I also know that after acquisition some services wither.I am confident that won't happen here. There is a shared passion and vision for Bloglines, and I'm very excited about the future.
I just tried your search in order to look what kind of porn it would bring, and it gave me only linux and gentoo related sites.
Either they upgraded their search engine or they read slashdot.
How do you use an rss aggregator to read your email ?
How do you set up rss to read your email ?
How do you set up an aggregator to read your email ?
...to Ask A-Bunch-Of-Net-Idiots?
bloglines' user-interface is clunky and hard to use anyway. there are dozens of other better web-based aggregators out there:
dmoz
my personal favorite, waggr (www.waggr.com), is faster, easier to use, and has a much better interface
I just checked out what you recommended and it's terrible. Any aggregator (both offline and online) that treats feeds with the standard email interface just doesn't get the point IMO.
I use RSS to make things easier to skim and get straight to the things I'm interested in. Having to click each feed individually, and each post individually again is no better than going to the site itself through your bookmarks.