While feeds from WordPress.com blogs can easily be subscribed to by clicking “Subscribe” in the admin bar, you can add any feed by selecting “Manage Blog Subscriptions” under the new Subscriptions tab on the WordPress.com home screen. The features of Subscriptions are firmly rooted in WordPress.com, including the ability to immediately like or reblog a post from the Subscriptions tab and receive new posts from WordPress.com blogs via email and Jabber instant messaging.

In related and ironic news, Bloglines (one of the first web-based feed aggregators) will be closing its doors on October 1st, citing, “Being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact.”

Though the thought of following my favorite blogs through Twitter is compelling, I still keep a very active Google Reader account because I’d rather keep my daily readings separate from my social networks.

Do you still use a feed aggregator, or do you rely on your social networks for news? What is your opinion of Subscriptions? Will its deep integration with WordPress.com make it one of the site’s most popular features, or will it eventually fall to the same fate as Bloglines?