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It Is Bloglines You Mourn For
I am a long-time Bloglines user. Back in the day when I did a lot of training, Bloglines is what I used to illustrate the power of RSS feeds and why they were so gosh-darn important.
On Friday, I went to my Bloglines account and discovered this message: “we are sorry to share that Bloglines will officially shut down on October 1, 2010. More detail can be found on the Ask.com blog – http://blog.ask.com.”
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After a quick double check of the date (it’s not April 1!) I began to panic. NO NO NO. I clicked through to Ask.com and found the news got even worse: “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.”
Quick rant: Why does every. bloody. thing have to be a social experience? I cannot go to a library or bookstore for a book anymore, it has to be for the social aspect and friendships and connecting! And, apparently, now I cannot quickly read through hundreds of blogs and newsfeeds, no, it has to be a Facebook experience. Why can’t I just like to READ?!? And just because RSS readers aren’t cool and shiny anymore, doesn’t mean people don’t use them.
Darn kids, got off my lawn!
Ahem. Rant over.
I love how RSS can be used, as mentioned in Ask.com’s blog. I do not love how that ignores the very real need that a RSS aggregator offers to readers or the assumptions that how that cool tech kids do things are the only way anyone would want to do things.
What am I supposed to do to keep up on blog reading, because I’m sure not going back to the olden days of going to each individual blog every day to see what, if anything, got posted. I love Twitter, but it’s all real time so unless I’m on when someone posts their feed to Twitter (a practice, by the way, some people don’t like), I’ve missed it. Facebook has similar time/timing issues.
According to TechCrunch, “Bloglines isn’t the first RSS reader to throw in the towel; Newsgator shut down its online newsreader last year. Now, Google Reader is all we have left; though even that product is slowly being replaced. We’ve put Bloglines in the TechCrunch Deadpool.”
Apparently, Google Reader is now our only choice and much as I love many things in the G-family, this isn’t one of them. Still, it’s what we have. Simply follow the instructions on bloglines to export your blog, then import it into Google Reader. It took me less than five minutes, and —
WAIT.
“That product is slowly being replaced“?!?
OK, my techy and non techy readers. Please share with me just what Techcrunch meant by that!
Also, do you use Bloglines? Or Google Reader? Or is there another way to keep up on blogs and feeds that I’ve missed?
Or, if you prefer, please just commiserate with me about Bloglines passing and let’s have an old-fashioned wake for it.
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About Elizabeth Burns
Looking for a place to talk about young adult books? Pull up a chair, have a cup of tea, and let's chat. I am a New Jersey librarian. My opinions do not reflect those of my employer, SLJ, YALSA, or anyone else. On Twitter I'm @LizB; my email is lizzy.burns@gmail.com.
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