Bloglines, a property owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), is an RSS reader and aggregator service that launched in June 2003 by Mark Fletcher. In February 2005, he sold the service to Ask.com/InterActiveCorp. At the time, it was hosting over 200 million searchable blog articles. This past week, Ask.com announced that Bloglines would be shut down on October 1, 2010.
IAC bought Bloglines for about $10 million back in February 2005. Bloglines had struggled to gain additional traction after Google Reader had been launched.
Ask.com President Doug Leeds said that the reason behind shutting down Bloglines is due to the market changing. People are starting to prefer real-time news streams like Twitter. There has been a 20% decline in people using RSS feeds as a whole.
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