Ask.com to Shutter Bloglines Oct. 1

Oct. 1 will be the end of the line for Bloglines, as Ask.com announced in a blog post that it will shutter the Web-based RSS reader and news aggregator to refocus on its Q&A business model and due to the emergence of social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter. From the blog post: Primarily, it's about focus. Our focus here at Ask is on building out our Q&A offering. Our beta, released in a very limited fashion at the end of July, is seeing steady community growth with an answer-to-question ratio of 2:1, which underscores the fact that people are motivated to provide answers. Another encouraging metric: On average, users who are active within the community are asking two questions per day. These early numbers build on the competitive advantage we already have in the marketplace -- the fact that 30 percent of the searches on our site are already in the form of a question -- and are further proof that Ask needs to continue its tight focus on delivering the best possible answers to users. A little perspective: When we originally acquired Bloglines in 2005, RSS was in its infancy. The concept of "push" versus "search" around information consumption had become very real, and we were bullish about the opportunity Bloglines presented for our users. Flash forward to 2010: The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year , 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. Broadly, Ask's goal when we acquired Bloglines remains unchanged: to provide millions of people immediate access to the most relevant information wherever it exists. Whether or not you were faithful to Bloglines and that vision in 2005, I hope that you'll stick around to check out how we're evolving that proposition through a blend of technology and human insight with the new Q&A experience on Ask.com. We're just getting started.

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Ask.com to Shutter Bloglines Oct. 1

David Cohen

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