I always find it fascinating how some people get an idea, develop it, implement it, and then turn it into a real success. Bloglines is a good example. Today I came across an interesting post that shows where from the Bloglines started:
I looked at a couple of RSS aggregators the other day. These are programs that you run on your machine that allow you to subscribe to various weblogs that support a protocol called RSS. These programs make it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs.
I was very disappointed in what I saw, at least in terms of Linux based programs. Every one I looked at sucked. Couldn’t get any of them to work.
What’s interesting is that people have been focusing on creating client side RSS aggregators. I think the world needs a very good server side aggregator. I’d use it. You could do all sorts of interesting things with a server side aggregator. You could probably fund it with advertising (at least the Google style text advertising en vogue these days).
Did you ever read the Orson Scott Card book Ender’s Game? In the future world depicted in the book, there’s a vast computer network, a la the Internet, with discussion forums. While we aren’t lacking in discussion forums these days (mailing lists, USENET, web boards), I think a closer analogy to what was in the book would be blogs as viewed through an aggregator.
That’s from Mark Fletcher’s blog. Mark Fletcher is the CEO of Bloglines. The post was written on 4th of March, 2003. That’s slighly more than two years ago.
