There are also issues inherent in the market for RSS readers that, as Ask.com's president Doug Leeds told TechCrunch, make running the service a losing proposition for the company. According to Leeds, IAC's market research indicates that the number of people consuming RSS feeds has declined as people shift their news consumption to other sources like Twitter. Indeed, as we noted last December, one of the most interesting trends of 2009 was the gradual decline of RSS readers.

A Monopoly for Google Reader?

Back in 2008, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick argued that Bloglines was an important part of the RSS ecosystem and that "Google should not have monopoly control over RSS readers." Now, after Newsgator and Bloglines have shuttered their web-based tools, Google Reader does effectively have this monopoly over web-based RSS readers. On the desktop, though, you still have numerous excellent options, including NetNewsWire for the Mac and FeedDemon for Windows. With Fever ($30) and Tiny Tiny RSS (free and open source), you can also host your own web-based RSS reader on your own server.

Are You Going to Miss Bloglines?

Most of us here at RWW switched away from Bloglines a long time ago. Will you miss Bloglines? Or did you switch away, too? Did you move to another RSS reader or did you abandon RSS altogether?

Tomorrow morning Fletcher will unveil his newest creation, a lightweight group communication tool called SnapGroups. We first wrote about it two weeks ago but hadn't been able to take a look until tonight. We're happy to report that you're probably going to like it a lot: it's easy, it's clear, it's got good social design and it's real time. Check out the screenshots below.

Update: Just after we posted this, Fletcher says he's lifted the password from the site and it's live!

SnapGroups makes it really easy to create a group discussion around a particular topic, invite people, set variable privacy controls and then participate in that conversation as part of a whole "newsfeed" style stream of updates from all your various groups in one place. Fresh comments, likes and dislikes get pushed to your browser live using a home-made bit of AJAX and the whole thing couldn't be much simpler. It's a lot of fun to use, in fact.

Fletcher says this is only the beginning, that all kinds of features are still to come, but he's focused on the basics for now. He started working on the site in October and says his favorite part of the project was "learning about the new technologies that have sprung up in the past couple years." "The various databases that have come out recently are great," he told us. "I'm using Mongo, but there are many interesting projects now." The core of the site is written in C++.

Fletcher says SnapGroups will go live tomorrow morning. You should try it out when it does. Invites to groups will no doubt be flying around Twitter and Facebook. It may very well become something you want to use regularly. Hopefully there will be a way to export your conversations easily. Fletcher is a pretty straightforward guy and will probably implement just about anything that enough people ask for and that isn't too hard to do.

Mark Fletcher has a habit of building relatively simple things, like the first major email list system and the first popular RSS reader, that end up being a defining player in the rise of a new era online. Simple, real-time group communication? Not at all hard to imagine that being a big new thing as well.

Fletcher planned on unveiling the company tonight at Dave McClure's Palo Alto event Lean Startups but had technical problems hours before going on stage that delayed the launch of the site. None the less, he offered some details about what we can expect next week.

Fletcher promised that SnapGroups will include rainbows and unicorns specifically, but thematically will be focused on real-time group communication. Given the company's name, we presume SnapGroups will facilitate quick and easy group creation. "Groups are incredibly powerful," Fletcher said tonight, "the best thing about the internet is group communication. But over the last 10 to 12 years groups have stagnated. Yahoo hasn't done anything with Yahoo Groups."

Fletcher said he used outsourced development and design services extensively in creating SnapGroups. He built the site for a mere $6k, a tiny fraction of what it took to build his previous products. There will be Twitter integration at launch and Facebook integration later. "We will tap into power-user groups at first," Fletcher explained, "and have larger moderator groups to help shape the service going forward."

Here at ReadWriteWeb we agree that groups are where it's at, see our write-up titled Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web. We're very excited to see how Fletcher productizes the ability to communicate with groups of people. Watch this space next week.

Despite its shortcomings, Bloglines is worth a look and when it works it works very well for many people. RSS is such a powerful media that it's essential that the market leader, Google, be kept on their toes.

What Happened?

In a lunchtime announcement today, Bloglines' Eric Engleman (usually a very charming fellow) offered an update that's unlikely to satisfy at least the most discerning Bloglines users.

Some folks might have noticed that specific feeds were not updating recently on Bloglines, and we wanted to update you and fill you in on what's been going on. We have figured out what the glitch has been. Over the weekend, a fix was released on Bloglines to resolve the issue. All feeds should now be updating and back to normal.

That doesn't sound like filling in anyone about what's been going on, that sounds like an assurance that unnamed problems are solved. That's fine, it was probably a pretty simple error that lead to feeds not being checked for updates.

Update: More details from Engleman...

More technical details is that there was a bug related to the RSS crawling infrastructure relating to feeds that "errored" out. In other words, specific feeds would "error" out then not get recrawled. Prior to this last weekend, feeds were being fixed on a case by case basis. As of this weekend, all feeds should be updating correctly.

Blogines Is Popular For a Reason

On a good day, Bloglines has a lot going for it. It supports OpenID login, which is great. The year-old Beta version is much more attractive than the washed out colors of Google Reader. Bloglines Mobile is a much better mobile reader than Google Reader Mobile, though we haven't tested out the iPhone versions. It's nice that Bloglines shows you how many subscribers a feed has whenever you look at it, and thank goodness for those subscriber counts being put to use for spam control in parent company Ask.com's blog search, one of the best blog search engines on the web.

Bloglines lets you organize your own startpage view by dragging and dropping feeds you're subscribed to. That's pretty cool. We wrote about the new version of Bloglines a year ago this summer and we really liked it a lot.

Unfortunately, we can't figure out how to get a "river of news" view inside the new Bloglines, meaning: show me the most recent individual post from all the feeds in a folder, in the order the item arrived in, don't show me every unread item in one feed before you show me another. That's a deal-killer for this author, though otherwise I'd love to use the Bloglines Beta instead of Google Reader.

Google Reader Should Not Have Monopoly Control Over RSS Readers!

Google Reader, despite its market dominance, superior feature set and burning love from user/advocates, should not be the end of RSS reader development. Google's control over huge stores of information, including your reading history, isn't an unconditional good. Perhaps more important to users though, is the fact that Google Apps tend to be crude substitutes for real software and they are almost never updated. Google Reader may be one of the least crude, but it took years before the company added search of all things to Google Reader.

Google made huge waves earlier this month when they said that some time soon they will add RSS to web search queries, making them the last major search engine to do so. This weekend Google made changes to its iGoogle RSS startpage that enraged millions of users.

Do you really want Google to nail down complete dominance over the world of RSS? We sure don't. We want to see a multitude of viable companies offering competing feature sets, being responsive to their users' needs and innovating. In other words, Long Live Bloglines!

Back in 2005, though, we called Bloglines the "Google of RSS," and even today, Bloglines is still slightly ahead of Google Reader in terms of its user base.

Also in 2005, a number of long discussions about advertising on Bloglines and in RSS aggregators in general kept the blogosphere quite busy. Back then, many publishers protested when Bloglines announced that it was planning to put contextual ads next to their content, and in the end, Bloglines backed off from the idea and did not feature any advertising on its site until today. This early controversy around advertising in RSS aggregators probably also led most of Bloglines' competitors like Newsgator or Google Readerto shy away from putting ads on their services as well.

For Now, Ads on Start Page Only

The difference this time, however, is that Bloglines is only putting the ads on the start page, where Bloglines only displays information about the service itself and doesn't feature any external content. According to a post on the Bloglines blog, Bloglines is also pursuing other monetization options within the feed reader, though the post does not go into any specifics.

A couple of things set Regator apart from other RSS aggregators like Bloglines, Newsgator, or Google Reader. First of all, Regator only offers a set of roughly 3000 blogs to subscribe to, as well as 'channels,' like Technology, Politics, Sports, etc.

You can't import your own OPML files or subscribe to blogs from outside of Regator. While this is clearly meant to keep things simple for Regator's user base, it does limit its usefulness for more advanced users. You can, however, nominate your favorite blogs to be added to Regator's catalog.

Another difference between Regator and other RSS aggregators is that while Regator opens in a River of News style view, the default view is organized by popularity, not chronology. Users can vote up or down on every post and those votes determine the position of the posts on the site. Regator does have the option to switch to a chronological view.

While Regator does not feature any social networking or sharing functions yet, users can comment on blog posts, though those comments stay within the Regator silo.

Only Summaries

One thing that might make bloggers happy, but makes Regator just a little bit less useful is the fact that it only displays summaries and not the full text of all blog posts. It also doesn't display any pictures from those blog posts, even if they are part of the summary. Regator says they are doing this to give back to the bloggers featured on the site. Given the many discussions around full feeds and community sites lately, they are definitely doing the right thing, especially because Regator has comments on its site.

Audio and Video

Besides blog posts, Regator also functions as a podcast and video player. Posts with embedded media like mp3 files or YouTube videos will display those in either a pop-up player for videos or a little audio player at the bottom of the screen (see screenshot). Especially the audio player is a nifty solution, as you can keep browsing the site while the player stays out of the way at the bottom of the page.

Verdict

Overall, Regator seems like a very well thought out product. Finding blogs and channels to read is easy and the "What's Hot" bar on the right side gives you a quick overview of what the most hotly debated topics in the blogosphere are right now. The green theme, which can't be changed, might not be everybody's cup of tea, but the layout of the site works very well.

Invites

Regator has given us 100 invites - you can claim yours by heading to Regator's homepage and using 'readwriteweb' as your invite code.

There is no sign of life on the site and the Feedster blog has already been killed off (the big 404 in the sky).

In terms of the blog search market in general, Feedster has been struggling for 3+ years now - this RWW post in July 2005 shows how Feedster was falling behind Technorati even then. Now Feedster seems to be, if not in the DeadPool, then at least in the PurgatoryPool. PubSub was another victim in this market.

Nowadays, the blog search market seems to be made up of 3 main players - Google Blog Search, Technorati and Bloglines/Ask.com - and a lot of smaller players such as Zuula and Blogdigger. Personally I still use Technorati a few times a week, and the search function of Google Reader. I also am a heavy user of Google's main search, which I find brings up good blog results (i.e. often I don't see the need for a specialist blog search engine). I did a quick poll of the other RWW writers. Josh said he still uses Technorati sometimes, but also Google Blog search. Marshall said that he uses Ask.com for minimizing spam, relies heavily on feeds with subscribers in Bloglines, and uses Technorati too. He finds that Google Blog Search is good for speed.

What blog search engine do you use - and why?