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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?
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.
Can you please post some of the long list of sites you claim are shutting down?
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
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
? Are people really hanging up on reading RSS feeds? I don't think so
Have RSS feeds ever really been popular?
I have no idea how one would track usage, but I've always assumed that they are primarily used by niche users group. Power users. Geeks. Etc.
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
It sounds like you have a lot of interesting predictions, but not much to back them up. Maybe you're the next Nostradamus!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
***I've always wondered what RSS is good for.***
One nice thing was to bookmark an RSS feed in Firefox. Instead of just a bookmark, you'd get a menu of all the site's RSS entries (stories), which periodically refreshed (or could do so when you commanded). So you could look at your favorite sites and see all their headlines and then go directly to stories that interested you.
I say "nice thing" in the sense that, yeah, that's kinda nice...but not exactly rock-your-world revolutionary. RSS does make it easy to include feeds from other sites...but 9 times out of 10, who cares? If I wanted to read site X, I'd go to site X, without needing to see a list of headlines on another site.
RSS is far more available than used. 80% of Wordpress templates seem to have it as a default, as do many CMS systems. How often people actually use it is another matter.
Advice: on VPS providers
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.
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
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.
Sounds good, but you only said "there", without saying where.
No, he just works for Gartner.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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.
Sounds good, but you only said "there", without saying where.
Man... your quoted sentence is wrong in so many ways it made my head hurt while trying to parse it:
- "they the company" (as opposed to we the people?) ... as you said... have where??
- "The company's will" (so, because they died, they the companies are making a "will"
- "Have there way"
I am really happy I did not learn English as a second language in Slashdot :(
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!