Bloglines

The RSS reader that taught the web to subscribe, bought by Ask Jeeves in 2005 and switched off in 2010 after Google Reader took its readers

Shut down
19902026

Bloglines was a web-based RSS reader launched in June 2003 by Mark Fletcher, who had previously built the mailing list service ONElist. It let people follow hundreds of blogs and news feeds in a browser, with unread counts synced across machines, and it defined what a feed reader was before Google Reader existed. Ask Jeeves bought it in February 2005 for a reported $10 million and IAC closed it on 1 November 2010.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2003
  2. June 2003 Launch
    Bloglines opens

    Server-side subscriptions, synced unread counts.

  3. 2005
  4. February 2005 Acquisition
    Ask Jeeves buys Bloglines

    Reported at about $10 million.

  5. 7 October 2005 other
    Google Reader launches

    The competitor that took the audience.

  6. 2008
  7. 24 February 2008 Incident
    A long outage leaves feeds stale

    Users start leaving for Google Reader.

  8. 2010
  9. 10 September 2010 Shutdown announced
    Ask.com announces the closure
  10. 1 November 2010 Shutdown
    Bloglines closes and is handed to MerchantCircle

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: bloglines.com, 2 June 2005 →

Browse bloglines.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Mark Fletcher 2003–2005 Founded Built as a side project after ONElist
Ask Jeeves (IAC) 2005–2010 Acquisition, $10M Reported at about $10 million
MerchantCircle 2010–2010 Acquisition Took the service over rather than let it close

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Ask.com, part of IAC, announced on 10 September 2010 that Bloglines would close, saying that the way people consumed information had moved to real-time streams and that subscribing to feeds no longer fitted. The date slipped from 1 October to 1 November 2010, and MerchantCircle, another IAC-backed company, took the service over and kept it running for a few more years before it disappeared for good.

Our analysis: Bloglines was first and, for two years, best: a web reader that kept your unread counts on a server instead of a desktop app. Then it stopped changing. A long outage in 2008 pushed a lot of its remaining users to Google Reader, which was free, faster and attached to an account everyone already had, and its own founder said publicly he had switched. Ask.com had bought Bloglines to add a piece to a search business it was already losing, and once Google owned both search and the reader there was no argument left to make.

History [edit]

Subscribing, before everyone did it

Mark Fletcher had already sold ONElist, the mailing list service that became Yahoo Groups, when he started Bloglines in June 2003 as a side project. The idea was simple and, at the time, unusual: keep your subscriptions on a server rather than in a program on one computer, so the same unread counts follow you from work to home. You pasted in a feed address, Bloglines fetched it on a schedule, and the left column filled with bold numbers.

For a couple of years it was the reader. Bloggers used it to watch each other, journalists used it to watch the bloggers, and its public subscriber counts became a rough measure of how widely a blog was read. Ask Jeeves bought the company in February 2005 for a reported $10 million.

Overtaken, then dropped

Google Reader arrived in October 2005 and got better every year while Bloglines got slower. A long outage in early 2008 left subscriptions stale for days, and Fletcher himself said he was moving to Reader; TechCrunch wrote the destruction of Bloglines was complete. Ask.com stopped investing in anything that was not search.

On 10 September 2010 Ask announced the closure, arguing that people now got their information from Twitter and Facebook in real time rather than by subscribing. The date moved from 1 October to 1 November, and at the last moment MerchantCircle, another IAC-funded company, took the service over and kept it alive for a few more quiet years. Google Reader, the service that had taken its audience, was itself closed in 2013.

The domain today

bloglines.com no longer serves a reader. The pattern it invented, subscriptions synced on a server, is now how podcast apps and newsletters work.

Similar projects

goo.gl Google's link shortener, and the day old links died 2009–2025 Adobe Flash The plugin that animated the web 1996–2020 Delicious The web's shared memory 2003–2017 Google Reader The web, in one place 2005–2013 StumbleUpon The serendipity button 2002–2018 Microsoft Silverlight The Flash rival that outlived its purpose 2007–2021

Sources [edit]

  1. IAC finally kills off Bloglines TechCrunch 10 September 2010 [archived]
  2. Bloglines Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
  3. Destruction of Bloglines now complete TechCrunch 18 October 2008 [archived]
  4. Bloglines will be resurrected by IAC-funded MerchantCircle TechCrunch 4 November 2010 [archived]
  5. Bloglines acquired by Ask Jeeves Search Engine Journal 9 February 2005 [archived]

Last verified: 20 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).