Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher has confirmed the takeover of the RSS service by Ask Jeeves today with a full post to the site, including an extensive FAQ.
After some concerns being raised as to possible changes to the service, Fletcher confirms that Bloglines will operate as a standalone, separate service with continued support of current features.
Fletcher states on the takeover: “Bloglines became so popular because it was one of the first Web services to make blog and RSS feed reading free and easy to understand for average Internet users. We want to continue this quest to bring our exciting capabilities into the mainstream…By joining forces with Ask Jeeves, we will be able to accelerate our growth with access to the millions of unique visitors to Ask Jeeves’ properties. And we are eager to take advantage of Ask Jeeves’ support, extensive resources, operational scale and innovative technologies to expand and improve the services we deliver to users.” Fletcher will join Ask Jeeves as vice president and general manager of Bloglines.
Jim Lanzone, Ask Jeeves’ senior vice president of search properties said in a statement: “Bloglines is not only a market leader in feed aggregation and blog search, but it is truly one of the most useful and addictive services on the entire Web. We are excited about providing Bloglines with the resources to grow its service and help it reach a broader audience…Bloglines is a natural fit for our multi-brand portfolio, as we extend our information retrieval services to encompass the rapidly growing amount of dynamic content and information available in the blogosphere.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
