congrats to mark fletcher and the bloglines team on being acquired by ask jeeves.

once upon a time, a business development person at ask jeeves called me to talk about blo.gs. as i recall, the gist of the conversation from my side was that the site made no money, i spent no time on it, and there really wasn’t much to it.

this is another of those obvious-in-retrospect services that i can now kick myself for not building. having the vision, courage, and patience to execute on the idea is the hard part, of course.

at last year’s foo camp, when the limping feedmesh thing kicked off, someone suggested that we set up a yahoo group for discussion, and i made some comment about preferring something “more real.” a funny thing to say when one of the guys who built it (mark) was in the room. but in hindsight, i’m glad nobody wasted the time trying to create anything more real.

who’s next? i would think pubsub.com would be a likely acquisition for someone.

i also find this acquisition funny because there was a time when i almost ended up working at ask jeeves because i knew the ceo at the time. i got an early-morning call (or what was early-morning for me those days) where i agreed to fly up to interview, but i turned around a few hours later and cancelled, once i was awake and realized that i had no desire to work at a place using iis and asp, or relocate to the bay area.