Bloglines Gets A Triple Dose Of New Features
Bloglines has added three new features to its RSS reading service. — First up is the ability to save posts including text and graphics from within Bloglines to a "Saved" folder. This allows users to have quick access to previously read posts at a later date.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after blog news services were already fighting it out for reader share, Bloglines is answering with depth rather than breadth: a December 2007 update adds a Saved folder that stores entire posts — text and graphics — plus two more features, turning the reader from a transient inbox into something closer to a personal archive.
The move lands in an RSS ecosystem whose unresolved tensions are well documented in the corpus: panelists at the 2005 Blog Business Summit flagged how inconsistent feeds are to find and subscribe to, and a 2006 debate over the copyright status of syndicated content has never been settled — which makes a feature that copies full posts, images included, more consequential than a simple bookmark.
First-order effects
- Bloglines users gain persistent, searchable access to previously read posts without leaving the reader, raising switching costs against rival web-based readers competing for the same audience.
- Publishers whose feeds carry full text and graphics now see their content retained wholesale inside a third-party service, not just skimmed in a river of headlines.
Second-order effects
- Competing reader services face pressure to match archiving capability, extending the feature race that has defined the category since 2005 beyond speed and interface into retention.
- Storing complete posts with artwork sharpens the standing copyright question around syndication — the same debate that has run since early 2006 over what rights aggregators actually hold to redistributed content.
Third-order effects
- If readers compete on archiving rather than just aggregation, the durable value migrates to whoever holds the user's accumulated reading history — an access-layer position that outlasts any single feed.
- Feature additions do nothing to fix the subscription-discovery mess documented at the 2005 summit, suggesting the category's growth bottleneck stays at first-time adoption rather than power-user retention.
The trend: RSS readers are evolving from headline aggregators into personal content archives, with ownership of saved reading history becoming the competitive moat.