CNET Newsburst

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

~ the eulogy ~

CNET launched Newsburst in February 2005, in the two-week window when Ask Jeeves was buying Bloglines and every tech publisher in America had decided that feed reading was a product category worth owning. It sat at www.newsburst.com with CNET News.com branding, and it described itself as "a powerful and personalized tool for scanning thousands of Web sites."

The feature list on the login page tells you what a feed reader was supposed to be for in 2005, before the answer narrowed to blogs. Keep up with Dilbert cartoons. See the top iTunes downloads. The pitch was that RSS could carry anything that changed on a schedule, from blog posts to corporate announcements, and a reader was where you watched all of it at once.

It never got anywhere. Google Reader arrived in October 2005, and Bloglines already owned every blog sidebar badge worth having. Newsburst's distinguishing feature was that it came attached to a CNET membership. TechCrunch reported the shutdown on 13 December 2007 with a number from Compete: about 4,000 visitors a month, at a moment when CNET was raising cash and closing anything that was not core.

Service ended on 31 December 2007. Users got an email pointing at a notice on the site, with a link to export their subscriptions as OPML.

~ the dossier ~

~ the banner with the missing word ~

The notice archived on the site in February 2008 reads: "Attention Newsburst users. Newsburst has discontinued service. Click here more information." The word "for" is not there. Whoever typed it was writing the last sentence this product would ever show anyone, and nobody checked it, and it stayed broken through at least March of the following year.

The help page under it was more careful. "Newsburst will discontinue service as of Dec. 31, 2007. You may export the sources you have saved in Newsburst by clicking the link 'Export your feed sources'." Both of those pages also still carried the login form and a cheerful "Sign up now! (It's free)" link, months after there was nothing left to sign up for.

~ the membership that came with it ~

The pitch for Newsburst was largely a pitch for having a CNET account, which the signup page described as "a one-click, all-access pass to CNET Newsburst.com, CNET News.com, CNET.com, and CNET Download.com." The feed reader was the part of the portal that got you to log in.

That was the distance from where I was sitting. By the time Turkish broadband made a feed habit practical for me, around 2006, the default was Google Reader and it asked for nothing but the Google account I already had. A reader whose main benefit was single sign-on to four American tech-media properties was answering a question nobody outside that audience was asking.

~ the year CNET was selling things off ~

October 2007 is the context for this death. CNET Networks secured a $250 million credit line and sold the photo site Webshots for $45 million in the same month, then spent the next quarter shutting down properties that were not paying for themselves. Newsburst went at the end of December. The dating site Consumating followed in February 2008.

CBS bought CNET a few months later for $1.8 billion. The feed reader was already gone by then, and newsburst.com was redirecting to news.cnet.com, where it still pointed when the archive last looked at it in December 2008.

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