Bloglines Shutdown: Ask.com Misses an Opportunity

Ask.com recently announced that it will shut down the Bloglines RSS Feeder service on October 1, 2010. Although I am not a regular Bloglines user, I found it interesting that Ask.com said that

being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow.

I am a regular user of RSS feed readers, mainly Google Reader and Mozilla Thunderbird, and I actually use those readers to manage the information flow from sites like Twitter. Without feed readers, my ability to filter through large amounts of data for the information I need would be greatly reduced and I would not visit nearly as many information sources as I do now.

I think that Ask.com is missing out on an opportunity to turn Bloglines into a social media aggregation tool. Every social media platform generates an information stream and people need help managing them.

If you are a Bloglines user, don’t give up on the utility of RSS feeds because there are plenty of alternatives out there!