Bloglines

» see bloglines.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

bloglines went live in june 2003 from mark fletcher, who had previously run onelist (the email-discussion service that became yahoo groups). the pitch was a hosted rss reader: you typed a blog url into bloglines, it fetched the rss feed every hour or so, and your browser showed you a unified inbox of new posts across every blog you were following. before bloglines, rss reading meant installing a desktop client like newsgator or amphetadesk. bloglines moved the whole stack to the server and made it free.

for the eighteen months between mid-2003 and the google reader launch in october 2005, bloglines was the rss reader. tech blogs bragged about their bloglines subscriber count the way they would later brag about feedburner numbers. the small "subscribed in bloglines" badge was on every serious 2004-2005 blog sidebar next to the orange xml square. fletcher kept the team small and built the feature set out incrementally on a tight stack.

i was finishing university in ankara through this stretch, on ttnet broadband, mostly reading english tech blogs in firefox tabs. by the time i was deep enough into rss to need a reader, google reader was the default and bloglines was already losing share. i had a bloglines account briefly. the migration to google reader was not even a decision, it just happened to my subscription file one weekend in 2007. that was the part of the bloglines story i lived through directly: the slow drain of users into the bigger product, with no real reason to look back.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

ask jeeves bought bloglines in february 2005. the deal was small (low single-digit millions reported), and the strategic logic was that ask wanted a place inside the blog-discovery game that google was about to enter. the announcement bumped bloglines into mainstream tech press. by mid-2005 the service had over 200 million archived blog articles and was indexing them for a blog search engine layered on top of the reader.

fletcher stayed at ask through the integration, then left. the iac umbrella (ask jeeves had been acquired by iac in 2005 itself) shuffled bloglines through three separate iac product groups over the next four years. each handoff cost engineers. bloglines went from "loved indie product run by its founder" to "small line item inside a holding company" without a clean handover.

~ the cracks ~

google reader launched on 7 october 2005, eight months after the ask acquisition, and the migration took about eighteen months to mostly finish. reader was faster, had a cleaner ui, supported keyboard shortcuts, and integrated tightly with gmail and google accounts. bloglines kept its features pinned roughly where they had been at the ask handoff. by 2007 most blog sidebars had quietly swapped the bloglines badge for a google reader subscribe button. by 2009 bloglines was a long-tail product still loved by a small loyal base.

ask attempted a "bloglines beta" relaunch in september 2010 with a refreshed ui, but the timing was unkind. google reader still owned the category and twitter was already cannibalizing the casual rss audience. the relaunch did not move the numbers.

~ the postmortem ~

on 1 october 2010 ask.com posted a public note announcing bloglines would shut down on 1 november 2010. the framing was classic late-2000s rss obituary: "rss isn't dead, but it has moved on." users were given a month to export their opml files. the announcement triggered a small but loud user revolt, mostly from the still-loyal long-tail base.

on 4 november 2010, three days after the planned shutdown, merchantcircle (a small-business directory site) acquired bloglines from ask in a last-minute deal. the lights stayed on, but no real engineering followed. merchantcircle was itself acquired by reply! inc in 2011 for $60 million, and bloglines became a forgotten line in someone's portfolio. the service slowly degraded. by early 2015 the site was simply unreachable, and nobody publicly acknowledged the final off-button. one count from late 2015 had bloglines down for at least 320 days.

~ what got buried with it ~

the "subscribe in bloglines" badge culture. for an eighteen-month window the open web's discovery layer was small enough that one badge could cover most active rss readers. google reader expanded the audience, and the badge culture came back briefly under reader's own subscribe button. when reader died on 1 july 2013, the audience was already too fragmented for any single badge to mean anything.

the founder-led indie reader as a viable product. bloglines was loved precisely because mark fletcher cared about it. once the company was inside iac and fletcher was gone, the product stopped having a person who would fight for it. that pattern got repeated with reader (google's small team versus a larger google strategy) and later with mailbox (orchestra inside dropbox). bloglines was the version where the slow decay was longest and the death was quietest.

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