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Ask.com To Shut Down Bloglines
angry tapir writes "Bloglines, the venerable RSS reader, will cease to exist in a few weeks, according to its owner, Ask.com. Users should export their syndicated feeds to another RSS reader, as Bloglines will be shut down on Oct. 1, Ask.com said Friday in a blog post. Ask.com has posted instructions on the Bloglines home page for exporting feeds to another RSS management service."
very interesting.
well not at all.
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So now all ask.com does is push shitty spyware toolbars?
There was a time I LOVED Bloglines, but not for a few years. They kept having issues with feeds from common sites and certain aspects of their site returned the same error all the time (such as the error message whenever I tried to go to recommendations).
I switched to Google Reader earlier this year, and really haven't looked back.
This is just the first of a long line of sites that are going to shut down in the next year or so. In the last six months I have seen the addition of some of the most in your face adds from companys that I would not buy from for any amount of savings. The Internet is going to go through a major change like it did about ten years ago, but this time I think it is going to be just madding to users . Just here in the last few months the cable company we have has moved high speed users over to a single pipe, this is for a large City and the surrounding area and towns. But the price has stayed the same for much less service. They have halved the size of the space that they sell without warning and are upping the price. This is what happens when you let one company get a solid lock on an area. One good thing about this is a whole lot of what I call fly by night sites and video sites will go away. One can only hope that in the end it will get better for all the users. But if we do not stick together they the company's will just have there way with us.
Would you please shut down Bloglines?
The Beta version of Bloglines was my favorite reader, especially its mobile version. There is no other online reader I can find that will show fill posts by default in the mobile version. I was willing to put up with a lot of bugs and issues because I couldn't find a good alternative. Eventually it became too much and I moved to Fever -- which sadly doesn't support full posts in the mobile client and the developer seems singularly uninterested in supporting that feature. But I was able to force it to give the desktop version when on a mobile device, which works surprisingly well.
Still it is a shame about bloglines. I will miss it...
What do you know I wrote a novel
The ASK blog talks about Twitter and Facebook. Who the hell reads their feeds via those two? Are people really hanging up on reading RSS feeds? I don't think so.
The problem I think was the fact that they just couldn't monetize it. When you're getting multiple Ask spams in just about every article, and then they switch to Google Adwords, then switch back. It's all about the Benjamins.
Bryan
Old cruft on the internet dies and fades away, forgotten, never to be remembered except perhaps in the archives of google and the wayback machine.
At least that's slightly more permanent than the old BBSes.
Perhaps it is for the best. Sometimes the past is excellent information, sometimes it teaches. But sometimes it's just useless.
I've always wondered what RSS is good for. Now that it is dead or dying, could someone enlighten me.
Anyone care to comment on the history or future of RSS? RSS seemed like a great idea: an open format that allowed users to scan sites (Blogs, news sites, web comics) for updates. Also the privacy issues were limited because the list of sites was only kept locally.
RSS seemed like a great idea but it seems it never reached mainstream popularity. Most (?) internet users have never heard of RSS. Instead people turned to third party aggregators and closed sites like Facebook. What happened?
I suppose Ask.com will stick around to some extent like how Excite.com is still an active website, but no one will ever give it a real look, it's just "there" with the other legacy sites on the web.
Ave Molech Setting
Most (?) internet users have never heard of RSS. Instead people turned to third party aggregators and closed sites like Facebook. What happened?
Take podcasts.
As a podcaster, you can put up an RSS feed, or an iTunes link. Which do you think will get you more hits? Even people that hate Apple will use iTunes. Okay so you can put up both, but what does that get you that iTunes doesn't?
Now look at it from the point of view of a podcast consumer/user. You can use a different podcast app, and only get RSS feeds while missing out on some iTunes stuff, or you can just use iTunes and get 99% of the podcasts you want and a directory to boot with minimum fuss.
Tell me again why in either of the above cases you'd bother with RSS? So what happened? Real life and commercial interests. Companies like Apple are motivated to apply vendor lock in and make their apps as attractive as possible, effectively killing the open effort and corner the market. End users are motivated to use the most common and convenient solution.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
no other company has plagued me as much as Ask.com with uninvited, impossible to remove spyware and toolbars
From TFA : "Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact.. The writing is on the wall."
Obviously these guys have not heard of Google Reader...
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Everyone out there is always talking about Google Reader -- I've tried it and didn't really understand what all the fuss was about. Is Google Reader really all it's cracked up to be? Are there any good RSS readers out there that aren't Google-powered?
I will miss it, as it came to be as best rss aggregator those days. I sent them mails to improve few things. Finally they are giving up. I got to take backup soon.
I've been using Bloglines for five years. It's a great tool for a journalist trying to follow 100+ blogs every day. The question is: what is the best available alternative nowadays?
Vox is also closing this month.
Has there been some clamp-down on blogs?
First, I had no idea Ask.com had anything to do with it - I just use the site to read my articles every day. I would have gladly paid a fee to use Bloglines (small fee, say $20/year) because I found it so helpful. Not only was it one single webpage I could go to and get all the news/articles I want, it was portable (I could continue/save reading at work or on my phone), and I loved that the interface just stayed the same. Bloglines I logged into in 2005 pretty much looks like it in 2010 - and that was A-OK with me.
What's irritating is how they dealt with this. They gave about 3-weeks notice, which granted, is adequate. They link on the main bloglines page to a "blog post" telling you about the closure - and that's where the asshat starts. Basically, they state that because "everyone" gets their news from Twitter and Facebook and "instant" services now, people don't need an aggregator. Uh, say what? I don't get my news from Facebook or Twitter - and anyone that does is really, really dumb.
Sure, I can get a few pithy links or quotes from them, but I have 100ish sites that I track on Bloglines that the content certainly isn't replicated there. Then they go on about what a wonderful thing Ask.com was and how asking questions is the future - but they fail because they don't realize that SURE I type questions into search engines all the time - GOOGLE. Why would I ever, ever go to Ask.com directly when I can ask the same question of Goggle, and get the Ask.com results, PLUS the results for the entire rest of the Internet? Back when it was "Askjeeves.com" I think I went there a few times, but I haven't even though of ask.com in probably the same half-decade I have been using Bloglines.
The kicker...they aren't approving ANY comments on the announcement. I submitted one three days ago and it never got moderated, and I find it impossible to believe that no one else has commented. They just want to brush it under the carpet and forget about it. Much like the rest of the world has forgotten about Ask.com.
So I moved everything over to Google Reader. It's OK, I actually like the "scrolling through marks it read" feature, but what I am not excited about is the relative instability of Google products - they are always tweaking, updating, etc. and I really just want something that works and stays that way, like Bloglines did.
Life will go on. But Ask.com just sent me over to their competitor - I'll be spending even more time at Google now. And now I've gone from neutral on ask.com, to negative on them. I'll think twice before clicking a link to them, and try to find the info elsewhere.
I used to use Bloglines years ago, but switched to Google Reader quite a while ago. I guess I wasn't the only one... I'm glad to see they're making it easy for remaining users to move their feeds to a new service instead of just quietly disappearing one day. (Although it's a good idea to back up your feed list to OPML periodically regardless of who your newsfeed provider is, just in case.)
The fewer people who are writing blogs, the more people there are working out their issues the old-fashioned way at the Shrink's office.
As in I could not find a way to delete a Bloglines account when I switched to Google Reader. Now it looks like they found a way to do it for me. Thanks, guys!
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I started on Google Reader, and actually moved to Bloglines. The "beta" interface had some nice features that Google Reader didn't have at the time. And it was nice to have a break from Google. Casting around for an alternative, I stumbled into NetVibes. At first it doesn't look like a replacement for the type of site that Google Reader or Bloglines are, but after playing around with it for a bit, I found it actually is pretty decent. You can import your .opml file (via the big green "add content" button which took me ages to find!) and it throws all your folders up as "tabs" on your "dashboard". It has decent organization (drag and drop, mostly) and you can toggle from the default block-style mode (widget view) to plain list display (reader view).
NetVibes pretty much entirely avoids mentioning "RSS", obviously aimed at a more oblivious public... which may be a good thing. But really it's quite a decent online RSS reader for the rest of us who know what RSS is all about.