The feed aggregator has been open-sourced, and its domain is up for sale. As Microsoft gears up to feed-enable its own products, the shareware tool might be one of the first to be pushed aside. (eWEEK.com)The code for
Blogbot, an Outlook add-in that aggregates RSS and Atom feeds and delivers them into Outlook folders, has been open-sourced. Blogbot's domain is also up for sale, according to its Web site.
The motivation behind the open-sourcing is unclear, as no reasons for the code release were given on Blogbot's site. The developing and licensing company, Blue6.com, in San Carlos, Calif., hadn't responded to e-mail by the time this story posted.
"The first thing that comes to mind is there's an issue with the software, or with the company," said Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst at Jupitermedia Corp. "[If] they were unable to successfully market the product, they could have open-sourced it and moved on to other things.
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"Or it could be the philosophy of the company, that they believe in open source and want to endorse it as an approach," he said.
Or it could be that Blogbot is throwing in the towel in light of Microsoft Corp.'s plans to build its own RSS platform.
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Microsoft plans to provide a common feed list of subscriptions and a common feed store of data in Vista, the Windows client release formerly known as Longhorn, due in the latter half of 2006. The capabilities will be available to applications through Windows APIs.
The company also opened the door to letting users automatically discover and subscribe to feeds in Internet Explorer 7 when it released Windows XP Office Service Pack 2 on Tuesday. That feature has been available for some time in competing browsers, including Mozilla Firefox and Apple Computer Inc.'s Safari.
While the introduction of RSS into Microsoft's products presents opportunity for some developers, it could well push others to the wayside, Wilcox said.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Blogbot Open-Sources Outlook Web Feed Aggregator
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