Way back when RSS aggregators were the new hotness, Bloglines was one of the earliest large scale, commercial, web based feed readers. This was even before Google Reader.
Of course as a feedophile, I jumped on the platform and greatly enjoyed the service. It had its quirks, but at that point the bar hadn’t really been set.
Then Google Reader came along, and put an end to that relationship.
A combination of Google browser user interface fu and Bloglines just running aground with technical glitches after being purchased by Ask did them in.
Now it looks like Bloglines has pretty much completely dribbled away the significant launch lead it had and sizable chunk of its audience as well. TechCrunch has the exclusive that Ask has finally decided to shut down Bloglines. I won’t be in mourning but this’ll be one more thing I can remind the youth of the ‘Net about in my dotage. Kids, once upon a time there was another aggregator besides Google Reader. And it used frames! Not that newfangled AJAX stuff.