The saga continues. After informing us in September that the IAC-owned Bloglines was to be shut down permanently, Ask.com (the IAC property that operates Bloglines) has resurrected the troubled RSS feeder, the company tells TechCrunch exclusively. IAC has transferred ownership of the property to an unlikely new patron: MerchantCircle, an online marketing network for small business owners. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but we do know that the deal was sort of in the family—IAC invested in MerchantCircle back in 2007. We are told Ask.com will maintain the current Bloglines service until December 1 of this year, after which the service will be transitioned to MerchantCircle. → Read More
Of all the tech echo-chamber arguments, one of my favorites has to be the “RSS is dead” one. Sure, perhaps I’m a bit partial because Steve Gillmor set the discussion in motion in May of 2009 for TechCrunchIT. But it’s still interesting to watch all the sides swarm around the topic. But what’s most interesting lately is how for every one person that busts out the death of RSS meme, a dozen people seem to pop up with posts that refute it.
If RSS is doing just fine, shouldn’t that be self-evident? Why do we need so many posts pointing out just how not dead RSS is? → Read More
It’s finally happened. Bloglines,the troubled RSS feed reader owned by IAC, will officially be shut down, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. The site has had a tumultuous history, so it’s unsurprising that IAC has finally put the platform out of its misery. Bloglines, which is actually operated by IAC Q&A property Ask.com, will be informing users of the news today and will officially be shut down on October 1.
Bought by IAC’s Ask.com in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in jeopardy ever since the launch of Google Reader long ago, compounded by the shift from RSS to realtime news streams. Over the past few years, the site hasn’t launched any new or innovative features to boost usage. While we’ve heard in the past that IAC was considering shutting down the site, the company held off on killing the site permanently and was looking for ways to refurbish Bloglines. → Read More
Bloglines, the troubled RSS feed reader, has been down for the past 24 hours. The outage has even created buzz on Twitter (which goes to show some people still use it). When you visit Bloglines, the site has a message up that says it is down temporarily and will be “back shortly.” But with the site’s tumultuous history, you have to wonder how much longer Bloglines has before IAC will finally put it out of its misery.
Bought by IAC in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in jeopardy ever since the launch of Google Reader long ago, compounded by the shift from RSS to realtime news streams. → Read More
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. → Read More
Bloglines got a much needed band-aid this weekend that fixed the feed update problem that has plagued users for weeks and caused long-gone founder Mark Fletcher to write “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.”
In our continued testing we see all of our feeds now updating regularly on both the default and beta versions of the site.
But we’ve also heard that the service has been up for sale throughout this last summer, with no serious bidders so far (Microsoft and Newsgator may have had a passing interest). Bloglines was originally acquired in February 2005 for around $10 million, and our understanding is that Ask isn’t necessarily even looking for a break-even sale. → Read More
Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed.
Even Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher, who sold the company to Ask.com in 2005, is ready to jump ship. In a Twitter message yesterday he said “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.”
The problem is that Bloglines isn’t updating feeds from thousands of blogs, including this one (about a third of the feeds I follow have errors). Meanwhile, those feeds are quite readable in other feed readers like Newsgator and Google Reader. The most recent TechCrunch post our 25,000+ Bloglines readers see is from May 14. → Read More
RSS reader Bloglines has suffered a major outage over the weekend with the service simply ceasing to update any blogs from just before midnight PST February 24. Threads on the Bloglines forum suggest that the issue is widespread and to date no statement has been issued by Bloglines or IAC/ Ask staff in relation to the issue. A test at 11pm PST shows the most recent stories indexed by Bloglines are over 15 hours old. Bloglines users are not happy with the outage, with some already signing up for other services, and other comments including such as “Remember when they at least showed the plumber?” One commenter claims that Bloglines may be about to be shut down: A buddy who works at ask.com (owners of Bloglines) says that they are discontinuing the service because it makes no money and there will be an announcement tomorrow. A shutdown is more than unlikely. But users deserve some attention during an outage of this size. CrunchBase Information Bloglines Google Reader Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
This is a quick test to see if Bloglines and other RSS readers breaks on links. Dear RSS reader readers: There should be a link [between these brackets] if there isn’t then there’s something wrong. Is there? → Read More
Bloglines has added three new features to its RSS reading service. First up is the ability to save posts including text and graphics from within Bloglines to a “Saved” folder. This allows users to have quick access to previously read posts at a later date. “Photo Widget” provides large thumbnails of images from Flickr feeds; previously only a text description was available. Last, but certainly not least is the blog view function. The allows users to switch into a 3-pane view that shows the full post on the actual blog, as opposed to just a feed only version of it. What this means is that you can now view a full post within Bloglines where only a part-text feed is offered, but perhaps more impressively users will be able to interact with the blog as well, for example read comments and see other elements of the site, including ads. The new Bloglines was launched in August and since that time Bloglines has continued to roll out improvements and new features, including support for OpenID (with APML and oAuth support coming). Bloglines has lost its once dominant lead in the RSS Reader market, mostly to Google, but with continuing feature additions such as these it offers an appealing product that may well be worth another look for those who have left, or for those who have never tried Bloglines before. CrunchBase Information Bloglines IAC Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The IAC owned Bloglines has announced a number of new and intended features today. OpenID for Bloglines accounts joins with a new version of Bloglines Mobile beta and new personalization features as being available immediately. Perhaps more interesting from a particular perspective is Bloglines’ intention to provide support for oAuth (Open Authentication) and APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language). In laymen’s terms Bloglines will allow users to take control of their Attention Profiles. Bloglines has lost momentum over the last 12-24 months as Google’s excellent Google Reader service has taken the market lead according to some reports. A new Bloglines version was launched in August and todays announcement would seem to be part of Bloglines strategy of dealing itself back into the attention stream of the RSS reading public. (thanks to Chris Saad for the tip) CrunchBase Information Bloglines IAC Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Bloglines, the grandfather of web based RSS readers, launched a new beta site this evening at beta.bloglines.com. Like everyone else these days, the most notable new feature is an Ajax customizable home page where users can drag and reorder feeds for a quick view. Bloglines now has three viewing options – quick view (the new Ajax drag and drop view in the image to the left), three pane “Outlook-like” view and the classic full view with two panes. The site is also trying to manage unread feeds more intelligently, a common user complaint in the past. The company says more changes are coming. Options for saving, sending and sharing stories, tools for building link blogs, managing blog rolls, etc. are all on the way. In the meantime, the classic bloglines site will remain available at bloglines.com. Feeds remain synced between the two sites. Product iterations come very slowly at Bloglines, which was acquired by Ask.com in early 2005. The last major news from them was the integration of blog search over a year ago. Meanwhile, Google Reader has quickly grabbed the attention of the early adopter crowd, and is by far the most popular feed reader used by our readers according to Feedburner stats. Richard MacManus has a much longer review of the product at Read/Write Web. CrunchBase Information Bloglines IAC Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Bloglines has created the “Ultimate Pro” edition of iBloglines for the iPhone audience. It’s got added functionality like a “pin” to save posts or feeds until you’re on the fixed Web, the ability to e-mail articles, search for content, auto-refresh, personalized preferences and it automatically hides images to compensate for EDGE’s slogginess. I swear by Bloglines, and am happy to see any sort of mobile version. But it does hurt just a bit that Bloglines actually took away functionality from its simple mobile feeds a while back. It now takes at least three clicks to get to your feeds. And even with EVDO speeds, that’s still a timely process. The rest of the features — save the auto refresh function — still exist in the basic mobile version. But we at Mobile Crunch feel like we’re using the Web version on our Blackberry, when the iPhone is more capable of sizing down Web pages to the big, small screen. Please Bloglines, bring back (and enhance) a mobile version. Bloglines → Read More
“Everything you blog goes on your permanent record!” How many times have we heard that lately? From employment to family situations, many people have been frustrated to find out that things they intended to write for a personal audience is now discoverable by anyone in the world via search engines. Bloglines proposed a new standard tonight to change that. You can have private pages in places like Flickr and MySpace, but your page’s RSS feed can still be discovered by search engines. That’s what this new standard aims to change. The proposed standard will allow XML/RSS/Atom feed publishers to keep their feeds out of search engines and unavailable for discovery by adding an access:restriction tag to the top of their feeds. Bloglines and Ask now support this tag and will keep feeds tagged as restricted out of their search and subscription results. You’ll be able to pass a private feed URL to a friend you want to subscribe, but your prospective employer will not find it in participating search engines if you have a private account. The Robots.txt protocol that tells search engines not to index web pages was agreed upon in 1994, but that’s just for HTML web pages. A growing number of search engines are now indexing the more dynamic XML/RSS/Atom feeds first. This new standard is an important part of the whole story around limiting distribution of our private accounts online. I just talked to Robyn DeuPree, Senior Product Manager at Bloglines, and Paul Querna, Senior Software Engineer, and they told me that the company hopes that both content publishers (Flickr, Myspace) and search engines (Google, Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Icerocket) will get on board and make this feature available to users creating content who want their content undiscoverable by search engines. No formal agreements have been made yet with any other company, but it’s hard to know why they wouldn’t accept the idea with enthusiasm. Many feed readers don’t support formally authenticated feeds (where passwords are required) but this should be easy to implement. Will other feed readers respect this proposed standard? I sure hope they do – this is a great idea for which the time has come. Goodness knows I’ll start a whole new MySpace account if I know that it’s feed will be kept outside of search! → Read More
Ask.com, which owns the most popular stand alone web based feed reader, Bloglines, has just rolled out its long awaited new blog search engine. Ask/Bloglines has been the subject of a considerable number of jokes over the last year, after promising a blog search engine last summer. The new engine should put those jokes to rest. And the company is taking the product and the launch very seriously – Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone walked me through the product personally earlier this week. The search engine has two separate user interfaces. It can be found on the Ask.com home page (link to blog search on the right sidebar) as well as Bloglines. The underlying engine is the same, although the interface and functionality is slightly different on the two sites. Ask.com Blog Search Searches can be conducted by “posts”, “feeds” or “news”. The news option conducts a search from 7,000 pre-approved blog and news sites to reduce noise. Results can be narrowed to a specific period of time (anytime, last hour, last week, etc) and can be sorted by relevance, date or popularity. “Popularity” is determined based on the their “ExpertRank” algorithm and several sources of Bloglines data, such as subscriber count, links, citations, etc. A blog with more links and more subscribers on Bloglines will have more relevance than other blogs. “Relevance” factors in both popularity and freshness to give meaningful recent results. There are a number of other features worth noting. Feeds related to the query are listed on the right sidebar, along with RSS information for subscriptions. Each search result contains additional options as well: a binoculars graphic (scroll over for popup with last five posts from result), “Save” (save result to a clipboard), Subscribe (to a feed reader) and Post To (Digg, Delicous, Newsvine etc.). Advanced search features are accessed via an javascript drop down menu at the top of the screen. Bloglines Blog Search Bloglines is using the same back end search engine as Ask.com, although the interface and feature set has notable differences. A key feature is a “+” button next to each result. Click on the button and the full post is presented with original formatting (not quite the original formatting actually, but pretty close). Another difference – each result has a “more info” link that shows the number of bloglines subscribers for that blog and any citations for that post. My Thoughts on → Read More
There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end. What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day. I’ve tested over a thousand products this year, and have written about hundreds. And while some of the companies I write about get very positive reviews, I find that the only true test of the value of a product is its staying power: do I continue to use the product, and maybe even pay for it, as the days and months go by? So for those of you that are curious, here is a short list of the companies that have held my attention, and that I would not choose to live without on the web: Bloglines I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, but they’ve recently improved performance dramatically, and I really like that I can see the number of subscribers for each feed. This was the hardest one to include on the list, but at the end of the day I couldn’t leave them off. Del.icio.us I use Del.icio.us multiple times every day to store and retrieve bookmarks. I freely admit that there are better solutions out there and I may very well switch to one of them in the near future, but you have to hand it to Del.icio.us for inventing the social bookmark phenomenon. FeedBurner I love the statistics Feedburner provides on feed readership and has lots of advanced features that are important to me. And despite what I’ve written in the past, I know and trust the FeedBurner team. I just wish they’d get rid of the advertisement on my feed page. Flickr I enjoy Flickr more and more every day. I like seeing what my friends are up to based on the photos they upload as well as getting comments from others on my pictures. And I am starting to go back and upload old sets of photos from years ago. Flickr is just perfect. Measuremap The Measure Map blog analytics → Read More
I have to admit, I was hoping for the best but feared the worst as Bloglines moved over to a new data center last night. Their regular outages have enraged me in the past, although their stellar customer service almost completely made up for it (emails are returned instantaneously). Everything seems to be working very well. Bloglines is speedy and responsive. Let’s hope it stays that way as the blogosphere continues to explode. The last three posts to the Bloglines blog really tell the story of the stress they’ve been going through over the last few months. Reprinted below (read from the bottom up): Bloglines Has a New Home Bloglines has completed the relocation to our new data center. Don’t panic if some subscriptions haven’t started updating with new items yet. Our machines will be catching up with the activity of the blogosphere for the next few hours. We know a lot of you are getting the shakes so we didn’t want to keep you from your Bloglines any longer than necessary. There is also a known issue with some subscriptions showing incorrect unread counts. However, your unread items have not been lost. Clicking on the subscription will display all the unread articles. We are working to fix this. We’ll follow up with a more detailed post when we’re more settled in. Thanks again for your patience and support during this outage. – The Bloglines Team Mon, 19 Dec 2005 20:30:00 PST Moving Data Centers Bloglines will have a planned outage on Monday, December 19, 2005 in order to relocate to a new data center. Here’s our planned schedule for tomorrow: * 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC): Your subscriptions will stop updating with new items. * 4:00pm PDT (12:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be completely offline. During this time you will not be able to access your account. * 8:00pm PDT (4:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be back online by this time. New articles posted during the outage will appear in your account. We look forward to vastly improved hardware capacity and tons of elbow room for growth. Thank you for your patience during this outage. – The Bloglines Team Sun, 18 Dec 2005 15:50:00 PST We Feel Your Pain We’re not going to beat around the bush about this. Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately. Why? In short, Bloglines has been busting → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a profile of NewsGator’s online product only, not its outlook, feeddemon and other products. There is a natural tendency to view NewsGator Online in comparison to Bloglines, as the products are both very popular and similar in many ways. Company: NewsGator Founded: 2003. Acquired Feeddemon in May 2005. What is it? This profile reviews only NewsGator’s online product. NewsGator has a number of other popular products, including an Outlook product and the products offered by Feeddemon (recently acquired by NewsGator). We will probably profile NewsGator’s other products soon. They’ve recently changed their pricing structure, and based on its complexity (and user feedback), we suspect things may be further simplified over time. Today, Nick Bradbury (Feeddemon founder) further changed pricing for his product. The reason we like the Online edition is that it is not tied to a single computer. You can log in from anywhere. Also, Bloglines is the gold standard of web-based RSS readers, and it is natural to compare and contrast the two services (see our Blogines profile here) Key Features of NewsGator Online: – easy import of feeds opml file – two pane interface – clippings, folders and feeds on the left, content on the right (similar to bloglines) – alphabetizes feeds – can view all feeds, or just feeds with new content – fast updating – great “clipping” tool to save content with one click – sorting options includ by date, view older/newer first – nascent search abilities NewsGator v. Bloglines: Bloglines has recently had significant delays in updating feeds – often updating only once a week. That means content comes infrequently and is stale – just the opposite of the core reason for using an RSS reader. Their site is also down quite often (who’s seen the infamous Bloglines Plumber recently?) They are the largest RSS reader (other than Yahoo) (Bloglines accounts for about 30% of Techcrunch subscriptions, NewsGator is a close second), but these problems are leading many users to try out other services. However, even with its shortcoming, we find that NewsGator Online is not as good as Bloglines (but it’s close). To test NewsGator, we imported our Bloglines feeds and used it exclusively for a few days. Importing was easy, thanks to the Bloglines export feature and the NewsGator import feature. Snafus are noted below. Things NewsGator does better than Bloglines: 1. Feeds are updated much more frequently → Read More
Company: Bloglines Location: Oakland, CA Founded: July 1, 2003 (Link) Status: Acquired by Ask Jeeves on February 8, 2005 (Link) What is it? Bloglines is a free, web based RSS reader. It’s the most popular, with NewsGator/Feeddemon a close second by number of users. If you are new to RSS, Bloglines is a very good place to start (for a complete list of web-based RSS readers, see here). Bloglines has a “two pane” format, with folders and feeds listed on the left (bolded if there are new unread entries), and content from the selected feed shown at the right. If you read content from a lot of sites, this is an excellent way to organize information. It’s also very similar to the interface for most email applications, so its familiar to most people right from the start: Signing up at Bloglines is very easy. All they ask for is an email address and password: Once you are a member, you have a variety of great tools. Key Features: – add feeds of your favorite websites (cut and paste, or add a button to your browser toolbar to auto-add any site you are on that has a feed) – easy import and export of feeds via opml file – create folders to organize content – see the number of total subscribers for any feed, and see usernames of public subscribers – add in feeds from any other subscriber (if you like their content) There is also a very neat feature that isn’t discussed very often. You can create a bloglines email address. Any email sent to this address appears within your feeds. This is a great way to move newsletters and other interesting content from your inbox to bloglines. Clearly bloglines is adding tools and features to make it useful as a portal/inbox. They’re adding things like “weather” to further this goal. Overall, we like bloglines over other current web-based RSS readers, although we’d love to see a tagging tool like Rojo (Rojo profile here). You can see public feeds for any user at bloglines.com/public/[username]. For instance, my public feeds are viewable at bloglines.com/public/michaelarrington. Additional Screen Shots: Founder: Mark Fletcher Relevant Links: about faq press ask jeeves acquires February 8, 2005 media services Weblog for Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines search engine watch best blog/feed search engine (March 31, 2005) wsj article zerokspot.com bloglines v. rojo unbecominglevity bloglines review (2004) PodTech → Read More
