Bloglines On Life Support. This Story Needs An Ending

by editor on Aug.10, 2009, under TechCrunch

If you were a Bloglines user, consider yourself old school. Most people moved on to Google Reader long ago, and then bailed on RSS entirely for the Real Time Gang (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.).

The once-great feed reader, bought by IAC in February 2005 for around $10 million, has been on life support for a couple of years now.

A two year old beta site with new features remains in beta and has never been launched on the main domain name. A band aid was put on the problems the service had a year ago, but not a single new feature of note has launched since then.

Repeated attempts to sell the service for next to nothing went nowhere. And recently, we’ve heard, IAC strongly considered simply shutting it down. The team ultimately decided not to, but they are clearly looking for a long term home for the project.

Competitor Newsgator recently threw in the towel and suggested users port their feeds over to Google Reader.

Something interesting needs to happen at Bloglines at a product level, or they will, inevitably, be deadpooled.

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