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."

Comments

Re:.com

[bcat24]

Dear mods,

The parent post is funny, not offtopic.

Kthxbye,
Jonathan

Future of RSS

[Z8]

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?

Re:Future of RSS

[Remus Shepherd]

A geek can cover 99% of their bases scanning boingboing, slashdot, digg, fark and google news in about 15 minutes,

If you're only scanning five news sites, you don't need an RSS aggregator. RSS readers are for power users who monitor dozens or hundreds of websites. You'd go mad trying to stay on top of that many sites yourself.

RSS readers are also very useful for getting news through firewalls. I can't read Fark or Digg from work, and I'm surprised they still allow Boingboing. Google reader allows me to get information that otherwise would be blocked off.

I used to have Bloglines, but for a while their site was broken and I couldn't stand it. Switched to Google last year, and I'm very comfortable.

Re:What is RSS for anyway?

[icebraining]

If I wanted to read site X, I'd go to site X, without needing to see a list of headlines on another site.

What if site X doesn't have any new items? RSS allows you not to waste the time opening all the sites to check if they have new content. Besides, the content is already loaded, hence it's faster to browse.

For me, with 48 subscriptions, some which only update once a week or less, it's very useful.

The sooner Ask.com disappears, the better...

[Anonymous Coward]

no other company has plagued me as much as Ask.com with uninvited, impossible to remove spyware and toolbars

Re:Its not a suprise for its users

[mukund]

I had the same story, until Google started asking for my mobile phone number as verification to link to my Google account. IMO, this is over the edge, as in this country you have to use your real identity to get a mobile number.

Then, I switched to a self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS and never looked back. I don't use Google accounts anymore, and don't have cookies or javascript enabled for any of Google's websites.

Except search and maps, I self host everything (email, websites, Jabber, RSS reader, calendar, etc.) on a dedicated server. There's a small price to pay, but as an example, I have the same email address for the last 10 years. I have all my emails for the last 10 years. There's no worry about privacy. As a programmer, it's useful to run irssi from it under screen, host my own websites, pretty much run anything network oriented..

Re:What is RSS for anyway?

[oljanx]

RSS is not dead and dying. One particular RSS reader is dead and dying. An RSS reader aggregates and allows you to preview the content published to many different websites, all from one place. If your like me, and you read from dozens of websites every day, you understand why this might be useful.

Re:What happened? Real life, commercial interests

[roju]

As a podcaster, you can put up an RSS feed, or an iTunes link. Which do you think will get you more hits?

From Apple's iTunes podcast spec: "iTunes uses RSS 2.0 plus some additional tags." There is no iTunes or RSS option, they're the same option.

Re:What is RSS for anyway?

[Hatta]

It's for announcing torrents in a machine readable format. Then your reader parses the XML, downloads torrents matching your criteria, and they appear in a network share ready to watch.