Bloglines, the troubled RSS feed reader, has been down for the past 24 hours. The outage has even created buzz on Twitter (which goes to show some people still use it). When you visit Bloglines, the site has a message up that says it is down temporarily and will be “back shortly.” But with the site’s tumultuous history, you have to wonder how much longer Bloglines has before IAC will finally put it out of its misery.
Bought by IAC in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in jeopardy ever since the launch of Google Reader long ago, compounded by the shift from RSS to realtime news streams.
Over the past few years, the site hasn’t launched any new or innovative features to boost usage. And we recently heard that IAC was strongly considering shutting it down. At that point, IAC decided not to shutter the service but was looking for ways to refurbish Bloglines.
While the site could be on its way to the deadpool, the cause for the outage could also be a product update. While we’re hoping it’s the latter, it’s going to take more than a feature update to revive the dying RSS service.
We’ve contacted IAC for comment and will update with a response.
UPDATE: IAC’s PR rep emailed us this response: “Bloglines is down for scheduled maintenance. We regret any inconvenience to our users and it should be back up soon.”
However, despite it’s being a “scheduled maintenance,” the rep could not provide the time when it is scheduled to be back up again.
