Moving On
By Mark Fletcher
- 2 minutes read - 372 wordsWell all, sadly it is time for me to move along from Bloglines. The service is in great hands with Ask and I am confident it will live long and prosper under their watch. But “why” you cry? According to my ever-present Ask PR twin, “to spend more time with my family.” And it’s true; my cats have begun to run with a bad crowd. Beard Papa has some new stores that need visiting. And there are American Idol tryouts just around the corner and I need to get gussied up. But the real reason is once a start up guy, always a geek (I know, say it ain’t so!). So what’s next? At some point I’ll start another company; that’s a difficult habit to break. But I’m also going to focus more of my time helping other startups and newbie entrepreneurs, something I’m finding increasingly rewarding. I haven’t really discussed that aspect of my career much here on the blog, but I’ve recently been involved with two startups. When Plaxo first started, I gave them some technical help. More recently, I’ve been serving on the board of directors of One True Media, a startup that provides some great on-line tools to create and edit videos. I’ve also really enjoyed my recent speaking engagements, where I’ve been able to talk about the process of starting a company and some of the lessons I’ve learned. In the meantime, Bloglines is in the capable hands of a great team at Ask, first and foremost led by Jim Lanzone, and including Robyn, Paul, Alan, Ben, Rob, Ryan, Andrew, Doug and Scott. Over the past year and a half, they’ve become the driving force behind the service and it is time to let them run with it. During that time, some of the major updates to Bloglines included: Package tracking, HotKeys, drag-and-drop feed management, Ping tracking, as well as vast and numerous improvements to the Bloglines infrastructure. And if that wasn’t enough, just look at the new Ask.com Blog & Feed Search as an indication that there are lots of great Bloglines innovations to come. I’m not disappearing. I’ll be one of the speakers at this Saturday’s Techdirt Greenhouse conference. I hope to see you there.