{"id":1032,"date":"2010-09-10T14:44:54","date_gmt":"2010-09-10T21:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/10\/1032\/"},"modified":"2010-10-31T07:00:46","modified_gmt":"2010-10-31T14:00:46","slug":"the-askcom-blog-bloglines-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/10\/1032\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ask.com Blog: Bloglines Update (and how I don’t get Twitter)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Ask.com Blog: Bloglines Update<\/a> – “update” is kind of an understatement, given that Ask is shutting down Bloglines. Bloglines was the tool I used for all of my newsreading (so second in importance after email) for years until, long after others had switched to Google Reader, I got tired of the increasing bugginess and made the switch myself.<\/p>\n

It’s not particularly surprised that they’re shutting it down, given that they’ve let it languish since they purchased it, but I am a bit intrigued by the supposed reasons. People don’t use newsreaders anymore because everybody uses Twitter and Facebook. I just don’t get it. And by “it”, I largely mean Twitter…<\/p>\n

I subscribe to a ton of RSS\/Atom feeds in my newsreader for a number of different reasons: because I am interested in a topic and want to keep up with the news on that topic; because I like a person’s writing and want to read anything they do; because I’m friends with the person and want to keep up with their life; because I like a product\/service\/website and want to keep up with the news\/changes to it; because I want to be alerted of various things, like when somebody mentions my website, or when a new photo is posted to Flickr around my house, etc.<\/p>\n

So my “input” comes from my e-mail inbox (GMail), my newsreader (Google Reader), my social network (Facebook). In theory e-mail is for two-way conversations and my newsreader more for being broadcast to, in practice this is somewhat blurred. I had tried to fix this a bit<\/a> with MailBucket, but that service is dead<\/em>. Either way, they are both required parts of how I live. Facebook is good in that it lets me keep up with my friends in a passive way, in that the feed on the home page changes all the time, never shows everything, and does not keep track of what I have read or not. Like everything else though, it’s now become yet another source for general content.<\/p>\n

Twitter, as far as I’m concerned, is microblogging, which is to say blogging (with a particular host), but always in short blog posts. So I can subscribe to interesting Twitter feeds in my regular newsreader, Google Reader. But why would I ever go to Twitter itself to read these? It creates an additional destination that lacks read\/unread tracking. The other problem with Twitter is that the signal-to-noise ratio has gone way down, and I’m yet to see a compelling solution to this. And why would somebody who already has a blog, start blogging on Twitter? Why not keep using their existing blog?<\/p>\n

Incidentally, I am subscribed in my newsreader to Mark Fletcher’s blog (the creator of Bloglines) and hadn’t seen him post about this… so I visit his blog and confirm that he has written no post about this. However in the sidebar, there’s his tweets, where he is of course, talking about this news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ask.com Blog: Bloglines Update – “update” is kind of an understatement, given that Ask is shutting down Bloglines. Bloglines was the tool I used for all of my newsreading (so second in importance after email) for years until, long … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[705,255,704,258,302,708,629,706,707],"class_list":["post-1032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-ask","tag-askcom","tag-bloglines","tag-email","tag-facebook","tag-markfletcher","tag-newsreader","tag-newsreaders","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faganm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}