Bloglines RIP

I'm probably the last to know, but Bloglines is being shut down on October 1. Now, I'll admit, I haven't used it much in recent months, but not because I didn't value its service. I simply got annoyed that they had added capchas for every time you log in. I can't leave myself logged into websites on my work PC and therefore, needed to deal with this annoyance every day, even to read the blogs I follow for work (library blogs). But it still does rss feed reading better than anyone for free, and that includes Google Reader, which is what I've mainly been using because of its integration with iGoogle and other Google services.

From Ask.com's blog:

"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.
 
"

While I can appreciate this, I'm also saddened by it. I don't want to read blogs in real time. While I have a Twitter account, I don't follow it religiously. I check it now and then. I miss a lot and I certainly don't follow blog feeds there.

As for Facebook, I have an account and I do follow many agencies and services there and do see posts containing blog entry links from my friends, but that's a small percentage of what I follow through a feed reader. With a feed reader, I can follow hundreds at a time without clogging up my screen. I can go into a folder on Bloglines or Google Reader and pick the new blog post I want to read. When I want to read it. To do that in Facebook is much harder and would require a more complicated group structure than I want there. I don't want to contemplate trying to do that with lists in Twitter. And with a feed reader, I have the nifty option of marking "all read."

As long as Google maintains its Reader, I'll be fine, although I'll miss Bloglines' nice package tracking options. I haven't discovered a way to do that with Google Reader. What will become a problem is that most of my blogrolls on my blogs comes from Bloglines. I will either have to see if I can import them from Google Reader, instead, or enter them into an RSS gadget, which will take a lot of work and time. Or I'll end up losing the blogrolls. I'm not really happy about this consequence of losing Bloglines.

I've used Bloglines for almost as long as I've been blogging, something like 5 or 6 years. I'll miss it.

~~~o0o~~~