“Outsourcing to China and failed auction killed Bloglines”
Story byErnst-Jan Pfauth
Ernst-Jan Pfauth is the former Editor in Chief of Internet at NRC Handelsblad, as well as an acclaimed technology author and columnist. He a(show all)Ernst-Jan Pfauth is the former Editor in Chief of Internet at NRC Handelsblad, as well as an acclaimed technology author and columnist. He also served as The Next Web’s blog’s first blogger and Editor in Chief, back in 2008. AtDe Correspondent, Ernst-Jan serves as publisher, fostering the expansion of the platform.
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Ask.com want’s to get rid of Bloglines
The problem is that Bloglines isn’t updating feeds from thousands of blogs, including TechCrunch (and you don’t want to piss them off). There are basically two reasons for this: a lack of commitment from Ask.com and a somewhat unfortunate outsourcing experiment.
According to our sources, Ask.com put Bloglines up for sale earlier this year, in an effort to cut costs. The company was expecting an auction to take place in August, but these plans sort of vanished as nobody seems to be aware about it.
When you look at Ask.com’s recent strategic moves, anyone can tell that it’s aiming for a larger share in the search market. Mainly byadopting technologiesthat several alternative search engines have successfully launched (e.g. related searches and clustering results). Oh, and don’t forget about thesexy ads. As it looks now, we can also add cutting costs to the company strategy.
Outsourcing Bloglines to China
Part of that is outsourcing the Bloglines development to China, our sources told us. Thanks to Twitter Search, we’ve found some confirmation. Ex-Bloglines engineer Paul QuernatoldMark Fletcher via Twitter that “Ask.com moved all of the bloglines engineering to china, what did you expect :P”.
This cutting move apparently didn’t work out, as Bloglines’ problems still haven’t been fixed. It’s sad to see what can become of a promising start-up when a mother company doesn’t have a heart for it (Jaiku, anyone?).
