I used to work on Bloglines. It's sad to see it finally die, but the writing was on the wall for years.
There are two questions I'd like Ask.com to answer: What will happen to the source code? and What will happen to the archive of RSS items?
Ideally, Ask.com would open source Bloglines and get the item data over to archive.org. We never deleted anything, so the item archive is around 11TB and has blog posts going back to 2003. I bet quite a bit of that data doesn't exist anywhere else. Although Sturgeon's Law applies, there are some gems in that data. I took a look once and found some interesting blog posts from the 2004 election cycle and Hurricane Katrina.
I seriously doubt that will happen though. Building an archival tool for the podserver/itemdbs would require more dev work, and there are the hardware costs of reliably storing 11TB.
Bloglines already has that logic. It would be built into any archival tool as well. If the feed url scheme is https or if it's using http auth, it's private.
I'd put everything I own on it (for reasonable interpretations of 'quite a bit'). I know from personal experience that web pages and blogs die like flies, and that the Internet Archive - the only live possibility for pages in general - often simply doesn't have copies or the copies are unavailable. (Lost a number of _Mainichi Shimbun_ articles, IIRC, to a robots.txt that went up years after the articles did; the IA respects it anyway. Sometimes the domain changes hands and the new owners put up a restrictive robots.txt; I hate that too.)
11TB of HTML & images goes a very long way. To put that in perspective, that's in the same area as a full copy of all Wikimedia projects, including the English Wikipedia and Commons.
It's just HTML/text and it's 11TB gzipped as of 2008. I bet the archive has grown since then, but the valuable data is the oldest. Uncompressed it's probably in the 20TB range.
I'd also bet everything I own that a significant fraction of the data is unavailable anywhere else. Google Reader started in 2005. Ditto for Google Blog Search. Even if they crawled the same feeds as Bloglines and kept the data indefinitely, they'll still be missing those first two years.
That seems a little low to me if you're starting with an 11TB archive. Doesn't gzip usually shrink HTML/text down to more like 1/5 or 1/10 the size of the original, rather than less than 1/2?
That greatly depends on the nature of the original data. Some forms of data are already compressed, such as images. Most websites apply gzip or DEFLATE (gzip is built on DEFLATE) compression serverside if your browser indicates it understands it.
It seems to have firsthand knowledge that this data has been stored permanently by Bloglines; what I'm curious about is why you think it wasn't stored by any other companies that crawl the web for a living.
If a tree falls in Google's archives and no non-Googler can access it, does it really exist? Anyway.
As AngryParsley says, the specific Google services in question inherently have a gap of a few years. I have already given examples from my personal trifling experiences looking up a few hundred dead sites where the sole public archive, the IA, fails. Scale that up to hundreds of thousands and millions of sites...
A bunch of folks in this thread have asked about an alternative that is better than Google Reader.
I created NewsBlur, http://www.newsblur.com, which is an intelligent feed reader. It shows you the original site (which is why I never liked using RSS in the first place, but once you read enough sites, you have little choice but to switch to a reader). It also has an intelligence trainer that allows you to explicitly hide and highlight stories that you like or dislike.
It imports directly from Google Reader. It's just a project, but if people like it well enough, I could be persuaded to add some more advanced features (metrics on your subscriptions, advanced AI, etc) for a monthly/yearly cost. I'm afraid to put a Paypal/Amazon Checkout button on there, because that means NewsBlur is held to a much more difficult/higher standard.
But anyways, please, offer feedback and let me know if you think this is a good alternative. I worked very hard on NewsBlur, and so I make it all open-source (everything from the feed fetcher, the reader interface, and the coming iPhone app) on GitHub, so that other developers could benefit from all the tricks and knowledge I acquired while creating this multi-faceted project: http://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/.
So would now (now that everyone has left the market except the winner) then be a good time to create a new, better, nextgen kind of RSS reader product (or something similar)? Something to disrupt Google Reader, the new market leader? Will the pendulum swing back from centralized (twitter, fb) to distributed (rss)?
Similar question: is podcasting ever going to go anywhere? Would now not be a good time to create a product for that market, now that it's been abandoned by everyone for a few years?
Or are both these technologies/markets evolutionary dead-ends, ie. never going to go anywhere anymore?
I think there is an unmet market, and the consolidation into twitter/facebook won't meet the needs of all people.
Bloglines and Google Reader both were flawed in providing the user with too much information; Facebook's feeds and twitters short memory prevent a buildup of thousands of unread things, and were better about promoting what was important.
People are still trying. Feedingo http://feedingo.com/ recently launched. I think it's a 1 or 2 person startup.
I think the long-term future of RSS feeds is integrated with my other social streams somehow that allows me to see all of them. Twitter could probably eliminate the need for a reader for a lot of people if they let you follow RSS feeds like you follow people.
I've been working on a new style of RSS reader in my spare time for a month or so now. Current RSS readers treat RSS like email, which pressures the user to at least glance at every item. I have 177 subscriptions in Google Reader, so you can imagine how much of a time-suck it's become.
Some ideas to solve this: (1) eliminate unread-item counts from the UI, and (2) introduce Usenet-style scoring and some sort of smart (Bayesian?) filtering.
The goal is to allow the user to decide how much time to spend reading blogs: if she only has time to read 5 things before getting back to work, she simply sorts today's unread items by score and opens the first 5.
Unfortunately, I'm not actually a good programmer, so I haven't gotten far. If someone skilled would like to implement this, I'd be grateful.
You could try out Planetaki (http://www.planetaki.com) it doesn't do anything fancy, just just puts all your favorite websites on a single page (full disclosure: I used to work for the same company that made it). It's a relief from the task oriented feed readers.
Pro tip: once you sign up you can import your websites from google reader at planetaki.com/username/import (not linked yet because it's in beta).
I created http://www.hackerblogs.com to fill my need for news about programming. Since then I rarely use google reader.
I like the river of news approach better than the categorized feeds. I don't care if I miss a couple of days of news, they don't pile up anymore and I don't feel like I have to read them all to catch up.
There has been a void for a great - heck, decent - RSS reader in plenty of years. Maybe Mac users didn't notice because they have the privilege of NetNewsWire.
As I said, I'm trying out Fever, and I'm sure others are willing to use a paid service.
I got back to using Bloglines, after I found out that Google Reader purges updates older than a month. Bloglines was obviously not doing very well and has had awful performance the last couple of weeks which has let me to try out Fever. That is, if my server didn't crap out. Heck, I think Bloglines' beta has been around longer than Gmail was back in the days.
For long, I've regarded the RSS reader market something missing some great minds and ideas.
This also brings up the discussion of keeping your data online - not only my subscriptions, but also my pinned updates - and what can be done about it. This obviously can't be exported, sadly. Sometimes, I just want Apple and Google to try to do everything so I at least know that I'll at least have all of my data somewhere.
Speaking of back-ups and portability, Bloglines seem to have removed its option to export the subscriptions as OPML in favour of XML. Can anyone verify this? It's pretty annoying to say the least.
Hmm? OPML is XML. To export your subscriptions, log in and then visit http://www.bloglines.com/export. That URL is linked to at the bottom of your feed tree, under the name Export Subscriptions.
I reluctantly switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a year or so ago when it became clear they weren't improving their product any further. Unfortunately, I've been just as frustrated with Google's lack of innovation. And it seems like the new services I've seen (Pinyadda, feedingo) are focused on dumbing down RSS for casual users rather than serving the needs of information professionals.
I keep track of a lot through RSS. I'm subscribed to almost 500 feeds, most of which are blogs and websites, with several that are search results or other monitoring feeds. Managing my feeds and seeing which feeds are providing me with value are my biggest pain points.
If there were a service that provided easy import from Google Reader (or an OPML file), that provided analytics on the feeds I'm subscribed to (update frequency, how often I read, how often I click through / save), good organization of my feeds (labels, not folders, ability to mark as high priority), and delicious-like saving / organizing of feed items, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
I'd pay $20 / month for it. More (up to $50) if I felt it improved my efficiency enough that I'm continually saving hours of time by using it compared to another service.
How many people subscribe to hundreds of feeds I don't know, but any modern journalist, industry analyst, political analyst, social media manager, or executive advisor tries to stay on top of many sources of information, and would find a tool that makes it easier to manage, optimize, & organize to be invaluable.
I just started using Instapaper recently - if there was an RSS reader integrated, I can easily add stuff into my to-read list. (OR, bloglines can integrate Instapaper into their reader - and that would also be hot.)
So I'm going through my bloglines feeds and re-entering them into feedingo.com. Apparently bloglines has been ignoring updates to over half my feeds for many months. The other reader finds very recent updates just fine. I had just assumed the feeds dead.
That was seriously puzzling. Bad enough the site seemed to forget who I was (but only sometimes; seemed it depend on what URL I was using), but having to do that stupid captcha thing each time was tiresome.
Still, I really liked Bloglines. I've several hundred feeds there, mainly because it was so simple to add them and organize them. I tried Google Reader but something about it was just annoying and clunky and wrong.
There are two questions I'd like Ask.com to answer: What will happen to the source code? and What will happen to the archive of RSS items?
Ideally, Ask.com would open source Bloglines and get the item data over to archive.org. We never deleted anything, so the item archive is around 11TB and has blog posts going back to 2003. I bet quite a bit of that data doesn't exist anywhere else. Although Sturgeon's Law applies, there are some gems in that data. I took a look once and found some interesting blog posts from the 2004 election cycle and Hurricane Katrina.
I seriously doubt that will happen though. Building an archival tool for the podserver/itemdbs would require more dev work, and there are the hardware costs of reliably storing 11TB.