Bloglines.com, a web-based news feed and RSS reader, has announced that the website will officially shut down on Friday, October 1st. Bloglines is owned by InterActiveCorp, the same organization that runs the Ask.com search engine. When asked why the site will be discontinued, the Bloglines operating team claimed that other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have led to a decline in the use of RSS. RSS (Really Simple Syndication), is a web feed format that allows web users to receive news, blogs, and more information on the internet by presenting a constant stream of updates to the user. By collecting and distributing RSS feeds, Bloglines was providing a service to users who used RSS a lot.
With the advance of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the like, Bloglines says they can’t compete, and that a decline in RSS usage has led to this action. According to an Ask.com representative, “RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly…Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact.” If you are a Bloglines subscriber, be sure to move all of your feeds to another RSS reader before October 1st. Google has their own service, Google Reader, that has added social media features to the site to help stay afloat, even if RSS does not.
Written by Brennan Mack