Bloglines On Life Support. This Story Needs An Ending

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Monday, August 10th, 2009

If you were a Bloglines user, consider yourself old school. Most people moved on to Google Reader long ago, and then bailed on RSS entirely for the Real Time Gang (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.).

The once-great feed reader, bought by IAC in February 2005 for around $10 million, has been on life support for a couple of years now.

A two year old beta site with new features remains in beta and has never been launched on the main domain name. A band aid was put on the problems the service had a year ago, but not a single new feature of note has launched since then.

Repeated attempts to sell the service for next to nothing went nowhere. And recently, we’ve heard, IAC strongly considered simply shutting it down. The team ultimately decided not to, but they are clearly looking for a long term home for the project.

Competitor Newsgator recently threw in the towel and suggested users port their feeds over to Google Reader.

Something interesting needs to happen at Bloglines at a product level, or they will, inevitably, be deadpooled.

Tags:
blog comments powered by Disqus