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I got an email today in regards to my Bloglines account that made me feel pretty good. You see, Bloglines announced that they were shutting the service down. Well, to be more specific, the announcement was that the parent company, Ask.com, was shutting Bloglines down. That was a real bummer because I’ve been a happy Bloglines user for several years.

What is Bloglines? It’s a free online RSS aggregator service — it gathers all the RSS news feeds that you are interested in into one user interface.

After the shut-down announcement, I had to check out other services and landed on Google’s Reader application. It’s not bad but it isn’t great either. It works well and I can’t complain much about it since it’s free. But I don’t like it as much as Bloglines.

So, the email that I received today announced that Bloglines has been saved.  A company called MerchantCircle has made a deal with Ask.com to keep Bloglines going! That’s great news to me!

However, the email links to a blog entry that provides more info indicating that the service will be changing a bit. This is expected since Bloglines is transitioning to a new company with a new hosting configuration and different technology (mentioned but not detailed in the blog entry).

Certainly, part of this deal will be that Bloglines will be heavy with MerchantCircle advertising. Hopefully it won’t be overbearing and overly distracting.

There are new features promised and mentions of some current features going away. Details are conspicuously absent.

The new version of the service comes online tomorrow – Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2010.

I’m looking forward to checking it out. Long live Bloglines!

Tags: blog entry, bloglines, bummer, current features, email, google, great news, new features, parent company, reader application, shut down, user interface

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 30th, 2010 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Fun and Recreation, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.