Bloglines RIP

1 minutes estimated reading time

Bloglines RIP to a well loved friend. On September 10, 2010 Ask announced that it was closing down Bloglines on October 1. On September 11, I removed my ‘subscribe to Bloglines‘ bookmarklet from the toolbar of my Firefox browser and closed my account for the last time after about six years of use – it had been a part of my daily routine and it feels really strange not logging in.
Bloglines screenshot -its been emotional
Today is Bloglines last day – and the farewell is a bit emotional. Bloglines was part of my work flow. It allowed me to stay up to date with the latest news and developments. Bloglines also worked well on my mobile devices, allowing me to dip in and out of the latest news. It wasn’t part of It made me smarter.

Instead I am now logging on to Fastladder. Fastladder is an English language version of a Japanese RSS aggregator Livedoor Reader. It’s mobile experience isn’t as good as Bloglines, but I found that I have started using my laptop on a 3G dongle and my mobile less since I moved to the iPhone from a Nokia E90. I considered, trialed and rejected Google Reader for a number of reasons.

  • I go to China a fair bit and Google Reader is blocked
  • Google Reader has some user experience issues, in particular the subscription process for a new feed it clunky compared to Fastladder or Bloglines. It is surprisingly un-Googly, Google is obsessed with imbuing products with social and has forgotten about the user experience
  • I think that its bad to have all your eggs in one basket. What if Google decided that Google Reader just wasn’t a big enough business for them, as they have done with other services?