Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
Smells like FUD to me. A lot of people posting about how horrid Jeeves is, yet nobody yet stating why? Have you actually compared query results? These days I've found Jeeves results to be around equivalent to Google, and quite often more relevant since it is much less a target to spammers.
Compare this to Yahoo and MSN results... (bad and abysmal, respectively) This leaves me using both Jeeves and Google about equally, but more and more I use Jeeves due to better results. If you want search only without any of the extra "smart answers" - you could also just use their backend via teoma.com.
If you really wanna trash Jeeves, at least give us a real basis to do so. Me personally, I greatly dislike the Jeeves frame that stays up by default when you search (though this is easily turned off anyways, permanently if you wish).
Boot doesn't really have to be its own partition. However, it is much safer to have it on its own partition, and not mounted in normal situations. That way you can never accidentally mess up something there and make your machine unbootable. It's a safety precaution.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.