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. → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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. → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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). → Read More
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