Bloglines Gets A Band-Aid; And We Hear It’s Still For Sale

Bloglines got a much needed band-aid this weekend that fixed the feed update problem that has plagued users for weeks and caused long-gone founder Mark Fletcher to write “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.” In our continued testing we see all of our feeds now updating regularly on both the default and beta versions of the site. But we've also heard that the service has been up for sale throughout this last summer, with no serious bidders so far (Microsoft may have had a passing interest). Bloglines was originally acquired in February 2005 for around $10 million, and our understanding is that Ask isn't necessarily even looking for a break-even sale.