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.

IAC and Ask.com put Bloglines out of its misery after a tumultuous history. Bought by IAC’s Ask.com in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in trouble, facing competition from Google Reader and a shift away RSS to realtime news streams.

While we heard IAC was looking for ways to either refurbish, or sell Bloglines, it looks like they finally got around to the latter. But MerchantCircle is a surprising candidate considering that it is not a media property.

MerchantCircle, which has been quietly snapping up companies, provides a business directory for merchants in smaller towns and currently lists 1.4 million small businesses. The startup has long targeted merchants in small locales versus catering towards the consumers, as sites like Yelp and CitySearch do. MerchantCircle has local business members in 95% of the 24,600 U.S. cities and towns with populations over 200. And the company could be eyeing an IPO in the coming year.

Ben Smith, co-founder of MerchantCircle, says he has big plans for Bloglines. The technology will be integrated into MerchantCircle to allow business owners to create RSS feeds on local news around their town, or city as well as their specific trade (i.e. feeds around plumbing, law, or construction). Smith says the platform will also be able to bring in feeds of local daily deals and coupons.

For all you loyal Bloglines users (the site has 2.7 million users), don’t fret. MerchantCircle will be keeping the former standalone service in place for non-MerchantCircle users, at the RSS platform’s present URL and Smith assures the the transition will be seamless for previous users (i.e. same log-ins and UI). One notable feature that will be missing is the Clippings feature, and users won’t be able to merge their saved clippings to the new platform. MerchantCircle will also offer Bloglines users customized local RSS feeds that users can opt into for hyper local news and deals. Smith adds that Bloglines has been tweaked slightly for a “richer, faster experience.”

Doug Leeds ,President of Ask.com says Ask was approached by a number of companies who were interested in giving new life to Bloglines but in the end MerchantCircle makes sense a new parent because they are “corporate cousins.”

Here’s the full email IAC will be sending to Bloglines users tomorrow:

As you may have heard, Ask.com has entered into an agreement with MerchantCircle who has agreed to keep Bloglines up and running. Stay tuned over the coming months as MerchantCircle works to improve the Bloglines service by creating a richer and more local user experience.

In the near term, your news feeds and access to the service (with your same password) are still available. You can read more detail about MerchantCircle and its plans for the service at the MerchantCircle blog.

For now, here’s what we want you to know:

Timing: Ask.com will maintain the current Bloglines service as is until December 1, 2010. After December 1, 2010, the service will transition wholly to MerchantCircle. During the month of December, you will be able to easily port your feeds over to the MerchantCircle-powered service. It’s an easy process, and we’ll provide you with complete instructions well in advance.

Logging-In: You will keep your same password as before.

Current Bloglines features: Your Bloglines subscriptions will seamlessly transition to the MerchantCircle service, however, the Clippings Tab will no longer be available and you will not be able to transport saved articles to the new service. We’re very sorry for any inconvenience this will cause – the infrastructure requirements and costs are simply too great to justify maintaining

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?

Just today, we have GigaOM, Dave Winer, and even Google pointing out that RSS is fine. Some, like Winer, say that it simply needs to be rebooted. Others, like Mathew Ingram for GigaOM, point out that the current way people use it will continue to supplement services like Twitter and Facebook that are supposedly killing it.

So what is actually going on?

The fact of the matter remains that RSS is not a consumer-friendly technology. If I said “RSS” to my mother, she would have absolutely no idea what I was talking about. If I said “Twitter” or “Facebook” to her, she knows who those are — she even uses them. That said, RSS does still often provide at least a partial backbone for those services she does know. For example, it’s RSS that auto-syndicates the content from TechCrunch to Twitter and Facebook where she reads it.

But overtime, that reliance on RSS to pump the content into these services is going to continue to erode. Instead, people are more actively sharing content by way of buttons (like the Tweet button and Facebook’s Like button).

Further, as the use of mobile devices continues to rise, new methods of consumption and sharing are going to continue to pop up. Flipboard for the iPad is one example of such a services. And guess what? Though it may look like it does, it doesn’t use RSS.

One of my favorite apps for the iPhone/iPad is Reeder. It’s a Google Reader-based RSS client that is fast and simple — perfect for mobile devices. But the problem with it is that you still need to set up your feeds through Google Reader to use it in the first place. Most people don’t do that. And despite Google’s graphs today (which curiously have no actual numbers) most people aren’t going to do that.

Look, I continue to use Google Reader (and Reeder) on a daily basis and likely will for many, many years. But that’s mainly because I have to for my job. It’s a mass consumption tool — but it’s not a consumption tool for the masses. If I didn’t have to (or didn’t want to) read and track a thousand stories a day, there is no way I would use an RSS reader. It makes reading content seem like a chore. It’s not visual at all, there aren’t great sharing tools, it feels very isolated, and it’s all about packing in as much information as possible into small windows. Ugh.

So while Venture Chronicles writes that consumer RSS lived from 1999-2010, I think that’s incorrect. I’d argue that it was never really alive. A few million geeks and professionals may have used RSS readers like Bloglines, but compare that to Facebook’s 500 million users or Twitter’s 100 million+ users — users gained over a much shorter span. RSS readers were nowhere near that.

And that’s kind of pathetic considering that you had RSS built into just about every major browser for years now. And it was being pushed heavily by companies like Google to customize homepages.

Something else to think about: while a technology may be in use by millions of people, if most have no idea they’re using it, they’re not going to miss it if it goes away. My hunch is that this will be the case with down the line with RSS. Twitter and Facebook won’t completely kill it off because they still use it to varying degrees, but they’ll continue to whittle it down, as will mobile.

As bad of an end-user experience as RSS provides on the desktop, just look at it on mobile. Do you think anyone is going to load up Google Reader mobile and type in URL to subscribe to via RSS? Do you think they’ll even take the time to copy and paste it in? No, because most don’t now.

Some of Winer’s ideas to “reboot” RSS could be interesting, but standards bodies and startups have had how long to come up with such ideas? At least 10 years. And no one has come up with anything compelling yet.

Anyway, that’s all for now until we inevitably have this discussion again in another six months.

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.

Doug Leeds, President of Ask.com tells us that the reasoning behind closing Bloglines came down to the fact that the market for people who use Bloglines (and RSS readers, he adds) isn’t growing, and is actually shrinking as people shift to realtime news streams such as Twitter to consume content on the web. In IAC’s market research, according to Leeds, there has been a 20 percent decline in people who are consuming RSS feeds as a whole. He says that Ask.com will continue to focus on drive traffic to and enhance its question and answer site.

Bloglines isn’t the first RSS reader to throw in the towel; Newsgator shut down its online newsreader last year. Now, Google Reader is all we have left; though even that product is slowly being replaced. We’ve put Bloglines in the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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.

Over the past few years, the site hasn’t launched any new or innovative features to boost usage. And we recently heard that IAC was strongly considering shutting it down. At that point, IAC decided not to shutter the service but was looking for ways to refurbish Bloglines.

While the site could be on its way to the deadpool, the cause for the outage could also be a product update. While we’re hoping it’s the latter, it’s going to take more than a feature update to revive the dying RSS service.

We’ve contacted IAC for comment and will update with a response.

UPDATE: IAC’s PR rep emailed us this response: “Bloglines is down for scheduled maintenance. We regret any inconvenience to our users and it should be back up soon.”

However, despite it’s being a “scheduled maintenance,” the rep could not provide the time when it is scheduled to be back up again.

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.

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.

The Bloglines team is currently led by GM Eric Engleman, who we’ve heard has been doing a “heroic job” despite prolonged resource starvation by the parent company. Google Reader probably has 2-3x the number of engineers working on the product that Engleman has under him.

The reason that Bloglines has become the unwanted stepchild at Ask? It drives next to no revenue, and it’s excellent blog search engine has become less strategically important as Ask.com defocuses on competitive search.

It might be time to dust off that resume, Eric.

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). This has been an ongoing problem. 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.

So what do you do if you are a Bloglines reader and ready to throw in the towel? Easy. Click the “Export Subscriptions” link on the bottom left of the page on Bloglines when you are signed in, and then import it into any feed reader you choose. Problem solved.

A few more Twitter users who are fed up with Bloglines:

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.

Dear RSS reader readers: There should be a link [between these brackets] if there isn’t then there’s something wrong. Is there?

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.

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)

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.

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

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!

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 Relevance:

There is a big need for the equivalent of Google Page Rank for blog search relevance. Link analysis on a post just doesn’t work – the content is too fresh to develop meaningful link analysis results. There are now three experiments going on with relevance: Technorati bases relevance solely on “authority” of the blog, which is calculated solely on unique inbound links to the blog itself. This works much of the time, but can break quite easily. TechCrunch, for example, can be the highest rated blog on just about whatever I write about, regardless of whether I know anything about it. If I write a blog post on a political issue, for example, it will appear at the top of results even though I have no qualifications for doing so. Bloglines is taking a different approach, by factoring in a number of statistics such as Bloglines subscribers, link analysis and other information. This may eliminate or reduce the non-topic-specific Technorati authority problem. Sphere is making an effort to assign real authority to a blog on a given topic. They look at links in and out, as well as a semantic analysis of the blog itself. Theoretically, on Sphere a blog that is relevant in one area won’t be relevant in another. It’s a good theory and may work over time in practice as well. But the blog search relevance battle is far from over, and I look forward to new experiments over time.

There are a number of different types of readers: web-based, desktop, Outlook based, etc… This post is focused solely on web-based feed readers. I’ve included the big guys plus some up and coming readers with outstanding features and/or performance like News Alloy, Gritwire, Attensa and FeedLounge.

All the web-based feed readers reviewed are free except for FeedLounge, which charges $5 per month.

The Web-based Feed Readers

I examined nine web-based feed readers (for previous reviews of each of these, see the TechCrunch Index):

• Attensa Online
• Bloglines
• FeedLounge
• Google Reader
• Gritwire
• News Alloy
• NewsGator Online
• Pluck Web Edition
• Rojo

I did not evaluate MyYahoo, the most widely used web-based reader, or similar products like Live.com, Google IG and Netvibes because these are more virtual desktop applications or portals with RSS reading built in. Heavy RSS users need a more industrial strength application like the ones I have listed above. I believe MyYahoo is a great option for a quick read of your feeds or for on the go feed readers viewing the Internet via cell phone or handheld device, but this service does not have the feature set for a heavy information consumer.

Researching these nine readers further underscores the extremely competitive atmosphere surrounding this industry’s development. On a feature-set basis only, two companies stood out: Rojo and Bloglines.

Google Reader and FeedLounge won my subjective feed-load test, which determines how well the application pulls up a particular feed. The test consisted of loading five feeds and taking the average of the load times and rating the reader on a five-point scale. Interestingly, FeedLounge is the only premium service of the group at $5 a month. Aside from the exceptional performance rating, I wonder what else sets FeedLounge apart from its free competitors. However, many users are religious about readers with a three pane display that FeedLounge, Attensa and Gritwire all offer.

Web 2.0 Features

Rojo, a San Francisco-based company which was reviewed previously on TechCrunch, has the most prominent web 2.0 swagger. News Alloy offers a close second though with itís tagging, rating and other content repositioning (i.e. add to Digg, add to del.icio.us).

User Ratings: Several of the readers offer rating systems, but I think Rojo’s “Mojo” is the most appealing. Mojo, a term reflecting user-generated reviews, mirrors a feature on the popular social news aggregator digg. After entering an item in the feed you can Mojo it to boost its relevance. NewsGator Online also offers a user generated content feature called “Latest Buzz,” which determines and displays the number of people linking to items in NewsGator. News Alloy employs a rating system similar to Rojo that tallies the number of times someone rates an item.

Tagging: Rojo generates a tag cloud from user-generated tags. Google Reader offers the same feature under a different name, “labels.” It seems FeedLounge uses tagging as the sole search and discovery mechanism. News Alloy also allows tagging of posts.

Social Aspects: Rojo and Gritwire feature “contacts,” which adds a social aspect to the reader, allowing a user to share information within a network of contacts.

Feed Discovery & Recommendations: Pluck, a Texas-based social media company, built a feature called FeedFinder into its Web Edition, which improves feed discovery. Rojo recommendations feeds in the top right corner of the layout while you browse.

Up and Coming Readers

Attensa, a Portland-based company, offers a reader that has a very professional and clean interface. While lacking many features the rest of the pack has, it pulls feeds up very quickly. In talking with Matthew Bookspan, Attensa’s Director of Product, I learned Attensa will be launching a new and improved version of the web-based reader that should fare better on the comparison chart. Additionally, Attensa will soon offer a mobile-enabled view of its reader, rendering nicely in handheld devices or cell phones.

Gritwire, a company based just north of Chicago, boasts a Flash-based feed reader that performs very well and offers integrated social networking features similar to Rojo. Gritwire uses a contact-list approach that allows you to share feeds among friends. I spoke with Ian Carswell, Gritwire’s co-founder and COO, who said Gritwire has more web 2.0 features in store, and I am curious to see them in action.

News Alloy, offers an Ajax driven reader with lots of power user bells and whistles. Though it underperformed in the subjective feed-load test Mike reviewed it previously on TechCrunch and found it to be extremely fast in other operations.

Feature Comparison Chart

The chart summarizes the research conducted in comparing these readers. I was not able to speak with every company directly so I may have missed some details. Consider this chart a living document to be updated if additional information becomes available. Also, I have left a number of competitors off this chart – there are so many web-based readers and I had to limit research to what I consider the main players in the field.

Summary

If you are looking purely for performance, Google Reader and FeedLounge are the fastest in our tests. Bloglines and Rojo are the best choice if you are looking for a feature rich application (and Rojo blows Bloglines away on “web 2.0″ type features).

None, however, yet approach the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

Editor’s Note: Frank Gruber, who writes the excellent blog Somewhat Frank, accepted our offer to write this research piece on TechCrunch. Thank you, Frank.

Update: March 31, 2006 (updates to chart)

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 tool created by Adaptive Path gives me incredible insight into who is looking at what on TechCrunch. They need to deal with the speed issue for larger blogs though (it takes minutes sometimes to pull up stats, or just breaks).

Memeorandum

Memeorandum is how I keep up on the blogosphere when I don’t have time to read all of my feeds. It has also changed what I blog about, and how. Memeorandum is a cultural phenomenon.

Netvibes

Yeah, there are a lot of Ajax desktops out there, but Netvibes seems to stay ahead of the pack on functionality. The flickr stuff is great. Plus, how can I not love a service that includes TechCrunch as a default feed?

Omnidrive

I’ve been waiting for something like this forever. I forsee a day when a service like Omnidrive comes packaged with a new PC, or is offered alongside web email solutions. I’ve only had it for a few days, but I’m smitten. And fair disclosure: there are some awesome competitors out there, too, that I am just starting to look at.

Pandora

I listen to Pandora whenever I write – sometimes for hours a day. I’ve discovered countless new artists from it.

Skype

What can I say? Along with Vonage, Skype keeps my phone bills down to next to nothing, and it is an integral part of my everyday business and personal life. I would trade application sharing for the new video feature in a heartbeat, however.

Technorati

I use it more than Google. No one has launched anything better, yet. And they’ve made great progress in search speed over the latter half of the year.

WordPress

I love WordPress. Actually, let me rephrase that statement: I love WordPress 1.5. Version 2.0 makes me want to throw my laptop out of the window. But it is an amazing piece of software, and all of my blogs run on it.

Yahoo Maps

I use Yahoo Maps because it allows multi-point driving instructions, something none of the others offer yet. This was incredibly useful when I had to attend three or four holiday parties on the same evening.

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 at the seams like the Incredible Hulk.

All of us here at Bloglines have been foregoing sleep and social lives over the past several months to keep Bloglines running and preparing for our move to a new access center (with bigger britches and a very elastic waistline).

So hang tight because there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The move will happen soon; we’ll keep you posted.

- The Bloglines Team
Wed, 15 Dec 2005 7:00:00 PST

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 on NewsGator (a very, very important feature).

2. While both services have a “clippings” feature, we found NewsGator’s to be much easier to use – one click. Also, the clippings folder is added to the main directory on the left pane, whereas bloglines has an additional tab to click to view clipped items.

3. If you want a PC or Mac based desktop client, you have the ability to sync feeds with that client so you don’t read the same content twice (Bloglines doesn’t offer a desktop service).

4. NewsGator was never down during our testing period. Bloglines is down frequently.

Things Bloglines does better than NewsGator:

1. Both have two pane interfaces, but Bloglines allows scrolling of the left pane whereas NewsGator doesn’t. This means that you can peruse feeds without losing the content in the right pane. This seems like a small issue, but we found it really annoying when using NewsGator.

2. Bloglines has a “mark all read” feature that clears out all unread content. NewsGator doesn’t have this feature, meaning we had to click on each and every one of our 250+ feeds after importing the opml file to clear out old content. This was a one-time issue, but it certainly got us off on the wrong foot with regard to our NewsGator experience.

3. Both services alphabetize feeds. However, Bloglines disregards “the” before the feedname, and we found it difficult to find the feeds we were used to reading by the name we remembered them by.

4. Bloglines shows the number of subscribers for each feed, and you can view public subscribers. NewsGator doesn’t do this.

5. Bloglines allows you to view public subscriptions of other users (and add them to your own). NewsGator doesn’t have this feature. Bloglines also has a permanent URI for each subscriber’s public feeds. As an example, here are all of my personal feeds on Bloglines.

6. Bloglines has a “keep new” feature for each post that is useful. NewsGator has no equivalent feature.

7. Bloglines has a useful but little known about email feature – you can create an email address and all emails to that address show up as a feed in bloglines. It’s very useful for subscribing to newsletter type emails that you’d rather have in your RSS reader than your email inbox.

Things Both do well:

Both have great user interfaces, options to open content in a new window or the existing window, options for folders to group feeds and good customer service (inquiries about both were answered promptly, within 24 hours even over a weekend).

Neither service has tagging of content, something Rojo (Rojo profile) has, and we’d like to see further experiments in this area.

Summary:

To be honest, we could be happy with either one. But if forced to choose, we choose Bloglines based on features available today. If the feed updating issue isn’t worked out, however, or if we see that damn bloglines plumber more than once a month, things may change quickly.

NewsGator has a good track record of responding quickly to user feedback, and most of the blogines features mentioned here could easily be added to NewsGator.

Finally, we note that with the ease of opml exports of feeds, there is no real lock-in of users, and a newcomer with fresh ideas could easily and quickly gain real market share.

NewsGator Management:

J.B. Holston – CEO and President
Greg Reinacker – CTO and Founder
A.V. “Sandy�? Hamilton – EVP Sales, Marketing and Business Development
Mark Nass – VP of Finance and Administration
Link

Links:

About
Press
Support
NewsGator Blog
Greg Reinacker
Brad Feld on NewsGator Pricing
Nick Bradbury (Feeddemon Founder)
RSS Compendium Blog
Don’t Back Down (“Newsgator is again going on the back burner. Just too many things that don’t work right.”)
Momathome
knowledge jolt with jack
home office voice
Azizi Jennis
Useful Sounds (slow bloglines updates)
Leonid Mamchenkov
Otherwise engaged (bloglines origins)
Fanteja
feednation (a newcomer to think about as an option, with incredible tagging and search options)

Tags: newsgator, bloglines, feeddemon, rss, rssreaders, techcrunch, web2.0, feednation, rojo

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 interview with Bloglines founder

Tags: bloglines, RSS, web2.0, techcrunch, RSS Readers