ITP SOCIAL MEDIA: BLOGLINES SERVICE OFFICIALLY CLOSES 11/1/2010

PHOTO ABOVE: How to save your work and feeds from BLOGLINES sinking ship.
BAD NEWS for BLOGLINES subscribers and those whom use BLOGLINES as a syndicate:
BLOGLINES is officially and PERMANENTLY closing between 10/1 and 11/1/2010. BLOGLINES closing will have little or no averse effect on this journal ITP V.010 as BLOGLINES is not and never was a "primary" feed or syndicate.
Hovever, ITP would like to thank BLOGLINES simply because BLOGLINES WAS one of ITP's
FIRST feeds and syndicates.
FROM BLOGLINES:
The Bloglines service will officially close November 1, 2010.
More detail can be found on the Ask.com blog - http://blog.ask.com.
We want to make it as easy as possible to transport your feeds to another RSS aggregator, so below are some simple instructions:
Instructions

Additional questions about this process can be directed to bloglines-help@ask.com.

Thanks again to all of our loyal users for their support through the years.

The Ask.com / Bloglines Team
FROM ASK.COM:
Today, Ask.com let our users know that we will shut down Bloglines on October 1 November 1. Not an easy decision, especially considering our loyal and supportive (not to mention patient) user base, but, ultimately, the right one given business reasons simply too hard to ignore.

Primarily, it’s about focus. Our focus here at Ask is on building out our Q&A offering. Our beta, released in a very limited fashion at the end of July, is seeing steady community growth with an answer to question ratio of 2:1, which underscores the fact people are motivated to provide answers. Another encouraging metric? On average, users who are active within the community are asking 2 questions a day. These early numbers build on the competitive advantage we already have in the marketplace – the fact that 30% of the searches on our site are already in the form of a question – and are further proof Ask needs to continue its tight focus on delivering the best possible answers to users.

A little perspective: when we originally acquired Bloglines in 2005, RSS was in its infancy. The concept of “push” versus “search” around information consumption had become very real, and we were bullish about the opportunity Bloglines presented for our users. 
 
Flash forward to 2010. The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year , being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact.. The writing is on the wall.


That said, plenty of people are still RSS aggregator-faithful, and Bloglines was lucky enough to be the news aggregator of choice for many of them. I want to thank these users for their support through the years. We are posting notification today, providing a three -week period to export feeds to another service – more detail and instructions can be found on the Bloglines website.

Broadly, Ask’s goal when we acquired Bloglines remains unchanged — to provide millions of people immediate access to the most relevant information wherever it exists. Whether or not you were faithful to Bloglines and that vision in 2005, I hope that you’ll stick around to check out how we’re evolving that proposition through a blend of technology and human insight with the new Q&A experience on Ask.com. We’re just getting started.


DOUG
FROM TECHIE BUZZ:
In early days Bloglines was one of the biggest contributor towards a websites feed count, and it still is for many. However, sadly users who used Bloglines will not be able to do so after October 1, 2010. Older websites feed count may also decline, specially for publishers who have been around for 4-5 years or more. However, the users are bound to move to other providers, so the count may jump back again.

Ask.com, who had bought Bloglines for $10 million in 2005 have decided to close it down because the RSS market has constantly been shrinking due to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. To be frank, I agree with that, because I have hardly visited my Google Reader account since past 4 months and instead rely on several twitter lists to follow feeds.

I remember having an argument with Robert Scoble on one of his posts about Twitter replacing Google Reader, and back then I did think that I would stick with Google Reader. However, as time has passed, I have realized how much more easier it is to actually follow news on Twitter, specially more after Twitter Lists were introduced.

Do you use Feed Readers or have you shifted to Twitter or any other similar service? Let me know your thoughts about using RSS feeds vs Twitter or Facebook to catch up on news.
FROM BLOG HER:
Four years ago, in order to build the blogroll of my dreams, I started an account on Bloglines. It would take many more months before I'd switch from clicking down a long list of blog links that I had emailed myself and kept in my inbox; before I truly used a feed reader for its main purpose -- to save a reader time by delivering fresh blog posts to a central spot.

Ask.com announced on Friday that after over 5 years of service, it will be shutting down Bloglines on October 1st in order to shift their focus to other projects. The main reason being that -- according to Ask.com -- people simply don't use feed readers like they did back in the good ole days of the mid-aughts.

Instead, we're more likely to read blog posts because people have posted them to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. Ask.com makes faithfully following a single group of blogs from a feed reader sound like something your grandma might do. They say, "plenty of people are still RSS aggregator-faithful" in the same tone one might tell you not to worry -- it's still cool to wear stirrup pants and an oversized Forenza sweater.

In fact, last year Techcrunch wrote off RSS feeds altogether:

It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.

So what's the story? Is RSS dead?

While I certainly click on links that come in from Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon, I'm still more likely to catch a blog post if it comes in my feed reader. (By now, I've switched to Google Reader because it doesn't require me to sign into yet another site, the one clear advantage Google Reader has over Bloglines in terms of jumping on and off the site.) So am I the norm or am I just one of the old Internet dinosaurs, not changing with the tide?

Do you still use a feed reader (and which one)? Are you more likely to read blog posts that come to you via social media sites? Do you agree with Ask.com when they say, "RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself" or would you miss your feed reader if it disappeared (like Bloglines!) tomorrow?
Thanks-Stay Metal, Stay Brutal-\m/ -l-