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Ask.com To Shut Down Bloglines

Posted by timothy on from the you-have-reached-the-end dept.

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."

7 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Wait... by Frogbert · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  2. Its not a suprise for its users by DarkFencer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Its not a suprise for its users by mukund · · Score: 5, Informative

      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..

      --
      Banu
  3. .com by spintriae · · Score: 5, Funny

    Would you please shut down Bloglines?

  4. It's a shame by jockm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  5. Re:What is RSS for anyway? by oljanx · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:What happened? Real life, commercial interests by roju · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.