Bloglines

Bloglines was founded in 2003 by Mark Fletcher in Pleasanton, California, and arrived at a moment when the web’s abundance had begun to outpace any reader’s capacity to manage it. It was among the first services to make RSS subscription accessible to ordinary users, offering a clean, browser-based interface through which one might gather the whole of the blogosphere into a single, ordered pane. At its height it counted several million subscribers, and for many it constituted the primary instrument of daily reading.

Acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2005 and passed thereafter through successive corporate indifference, Bloglines was never renewed with the care its users brought to it each morning. The closure was announced on 1 September 2010 and completed one month later. Google Reader, which would itself be mourned three years hence, had long since drawn the congregation away. Bloglines did not complain of this. It simply closed.