The end of bloglines

"As you may have heard, we are sorry to share that Bloglines will officially shut down on October 1, 2010. "

Well I hadn't heard it yet until I opened my Bloglines feeds last Friday. According to their blog, they have a different focus (Ask.com) and the rss push model on the internet has become less/ir-relevant due to the social communities where data is shared on a peer-to-peer basis.

Well I can see how the latter would impact their user-base. They forgot to add a last aspect that Bloglines is also notorious for technical outages. The Bloglines plumber or the red exclamation marks next to a feed are far too well-known for any of their users. That's the reason why I had added my most favourite feeds in google reader as back-up if Bloglines was once again down.

Nevertheless I found them much more easy to use than Google Reader. The latter catches new posts faster, but I don't like the user interface. It seems too overloaded with frames, the fonts & colours aren't attractive, it doesn't let me indicate posts as read or unread the way I want, it isn't compact enough so I must scroll all the time, ...

Seriously, do you think this is attractive?

But I want to have my feeds grouped together. Despite the fact that more and more information is shared on twitter & FB , I don't think they can replace a feed aggregator. Chances are that if you are a blogger and I'm visiting you, that you have seen my visits for quite some time now and that I leave regularly comments. Because once I like a blog, I start to feel connected and I want to keep following. I do tend to stick around loyally and I want to stay up to date. There's some people that I'm connected to on FB indeed and yes, they do post their posts on their wall as well. But FB or twitter updates have a short attention span. A few minutes later some people have "liked" a dozen nonsense pages or they've requested for the tenth time that day to "please click to save my icebear" or that other crap that pollutes the feed all the time. Geeez, can you please all stop doing that? (or can you forgive me that I block you, alternatively?)
A lot of the (mainly North-American?) bloggers I followed several years ago have stopped blogging altogether after being seduced by FB or Twitter (boohoo they also seem to have stopped coming by :-( ) . The blogosphere has changed for sure. But blogs remain a more substantial reflection on people's thoughts, life events or creativity and when I've eg been offline for a few days, it's nice to still find all those outstanding posts in the feed reader.

So now I'm looking to replace Bloglines and I'm trying Netvibes.com. So far I like the lay-out, the extensive flexibility in reading list lay-out, options to share mark tag , etc.... Not sure yet but I don't think I'll miss Bloglines at all.