Dancing About Architecture

As far as RSS readers go, I'd have to say that Bloglines is number one out there. Personally, I use both Bloglines and FeedDemon. FeedDemon is more polished, but I really like the "access from anywhere" nature of a server-side application like Bloglines: no matter where I reading my feeds, Bloglines always remembers my subscriptions and what I've seen.

But what might the future hold for Bloglines? Well, if the past is any indication, Mark Fletcher, the talented developer behind Bloglines, might be aiming for an acquisition ... and let's face it: as syndication takes off, the big players are going to want to add this capability to their list of services. And time is of the essence -- Bloglines is the big fish in the server-side pond right now, but word on the street is that Rojo (why-o-why does that have to rhyme with "mojo"?!?) could put some serious pressure on that dominance.

Okay, so who would acquire Bloglines? You might think that Mark would go back to the well and talk to Yahoo! (who acquired eGroups in 2000), but hmm, they just bought Oddpost. So, they've probably got something brewing there in the RSS space.

Google? Nah, not with the team that did Gmail on staff. They could whip up a kick-ass DHTML aggregator all by themselves, and if they're not, shame on them. Of course, they did acquire Neotonic in 2003, some old eGroups buddies, but I just think they'll do something themselves, though.

MSN? AOL? Still too early for them. In fact, I think the whole syndication space will probably have to go through another iteration (pushing the feeds down to the protocol level) before this becomes appropriate for the masses.

So who? I'll tell you who: Ask Jeeves. They're still hanging in there, but jumping into this space could be the shot in the arm the old butler needs. They've got some good technology (they're behind more sites than you might think), some decent revenues, but they need some buzz. Bloglines could be just the thing for them.

Of course, Mark might just want to go it alone, to which I say: good luck, and thanks for the great app!