Rubenerd

It is with a heavy heart and slight frustration that I bid farewell to another casualty of the short attention spanned intertubes and another aspect of my late childhood. Starting on the 1st of November, Bloglines will be no more. It will cease to exist, like a Parrot. Or a Boss.

It was a drizzly Singapore afternoon…

… in 2004 and I had just finished all my year 12 exams. I was feeling extactic and awesome, and suddently left with the realisation that I had all this spare time to fill for the first time in years. I decided to register for this site which claimed to be able to aggregate sites that I read all the time using RSS feeds, almost like having my own personalised newspaper, and to use it to check on podcasts, these great new things that let people easily broadcast their audible thoughts.

The things that initially drew me to Bloglines were its easy to navigate interface, and the fact I could check it from my brand new PowerMac G5 at home, and my workstation at Veritas. I didn’t need to syncronise clients or download feeds like a desktop email client, everything just worked! And it made sense, the data all came from online, so it made sense for it to stay there to make my life easier. I suppose thesedays one would use the cloud computing buzzword.

I discovered so many amazing new blogs from reading Bloglines, and I revelled in seeing what other people were reading. One of my best friends Jim Kloss up in Alaska had a Bloglines account, and many other wheatheads did.

Cloud goes up, cloud goes down

I don’t quite remember when it was, but as more and more people starting shipping over to Google Reader, I eventually realised that if I wanted to keep my conversations with people going, I had no choice but to move too. It was a shame, as far as I was concerned Google Reader looked more Web 2.0, but its interface was far poorer than Bloglines, and the beta version of the new Bloglines interface which I was a part of was fantastic. I also really like teal :).

While my friends from Canberra were here I took the opportunity to check my Bloglines account and saw the closure notice. I exported my OPML file, took a few screenshots, and bit farewell. I suppose that will always be the risk of using cloud software.

*hugs* Cheerio Bloglines, it was nice knowing you.