Bloglines and the death of the RSS reader – Telegraph Blogs

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Shane Richmond

Shane Richmond is Head of Technology (Editorial) for Telegraph Media Group. He first joined the Telegraph in 1998 and has been Online News Editor and Communities Editor. He writes about all kinds of technology but especially Apple, iOS, ebooks and ereaders, and digital media.

Bloglines and the death of the RSS reader

The first RSS reader I used was Bloglines. It even hosted the first blog I wrote – a few odd clippings of things I'd found online. So I was sad to hear that it will be closing on October 1. Of course, in common with many other former users, I defected from Bloglines to Google Reader years ago.

plumber.jpg

Bloglines was very flakey, frequently disappearing offline and leaving in its place a picture of the Bloglines plumber. In frustration I turned to Google Reader, which was very quickly advancing on Bloglines and soon overtook.

I've been a happy Google Reader user ever since, though I use the Helvetireader skin to make the site a little more pleasant to look at. Design never has been one of Google's strong points.

Using an RSS reader fundamentally changed the way I interact with the web and helped me to consume far more information than I had been able to before. It seemed obvious that everyone would benefit from such a service. In October 2006 I wrote:

"Email became mainstream over a few years. First it was only geeks that had email addresses, then students and businesses joined in and now pretty much everybody has a personal email address as well as a professional one. RSS is every bit as vital to my life – professional and personal – as email but I’m in the minority. Will an RSS reader that looks and feels like email help hasten the switch into the mainstream?"

The answer, clearly, was no. While RSS and feeds in general remain vitally important to lots of services, apps and mash-ups, the consumer market for dedicated RSS readers is tiny. And according to Ask, which owns Bloglines, the audience is shrinking:

"…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."

Does that mean RSS readers are doomed? I hope not. Though I use Google Reader a little less often than I used to because of the links that 'find me' through Twitter, I do still use it daily.

The demise of Bloglines has brought this topic back to the fore but it isn't new. Back in January, Read Write Web compiled a list of "reasons why RSS readers still rock":

1. Control over information flow
2. Evolving user interfaces
3. Tracking Twitter
4. Mobile news
5. Categorized news

One of the themes that comes out of the RWW piece is that for any topic that you want to follow closely, an RSS feed is vital. And the more topics you follow, the more feeds you need and the more essential an RSS reader becomes. For most people, however, they just aren't necessary.

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