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: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.