Bloglines RIP

RSS used to be THE way info-addicts consumed information. No jumping around the web, just browsing through 100s of blogposts a day that were shreshed out of all that messy HTML into a single clean reader.

No so much anymore, apparently. Bloglines, the biggest RSS reader, is shutting down. From the company blog:

The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year , being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact.. The writing is on the wall.

Does this mean the death of the blogging long-tail?

Stowe Boyd offers a LOT more context here.