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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."
So now all ask.com does is push shitty spyware toolbars?
Can you please post some of the long list of sites you claim are shutting down?
I think RSS was supposed to be a user generated, local, personal feed aggregator, a sort of "roll your own fark, digg, slashdot" - because face it, those sites really only pull highlighted stories from 10-25 other sites on a weekly basis.
RSS was really neat, and back in the heyday of online webcomics (what, 2001-2005?) RSS was a great tool for cartoonists trying to "spread the word".
Unfortunately, a) people are lazy, and few people want to collect, maintain, and prune their RSS feed list b) the internet can now load news stories faster than people can read them, and c) news aggregators like news.google.com, fark, digg, slashdot went mainstream, and a whole lot of niche blogs which act as news aggregators for more obscure collections of sites (boingboing specializes in scifi writing, steampunk, banannas, and DIY for example) -- why maintain your own RSS stuff when people are actively doing this for you, and probably a better job? A geek can cover 99% of their bases scanning boingboing, slashdot, digg, fark and google news in about 15 minutes, and get (mostly) interesting commentary about the stories, without having to register for the individual news website's forums everytime they want to leave a comment.
moox. for a new generation.