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

Wait...

[Frogbert]

So now all ask.com does is push shitty spyware toolbars?

Its not a suprise for its users

[DarkFencer]

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.

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:Bloglines shutting down!

[pete6677]

Can you please post some of the long list of sites you claim are shutting down?

.com

[spintriae]

Would you please shut down Bloglines?

It's a shame

[jockm]

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...

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

[Hadlock]

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.

What happened? Real life, commercial interests

[syousef]

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.

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?

[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 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.