Cav's Place

According to an announcement posted yesterday, The Old Reader will most probably become a private site within two weeks, the only accounts that will be transferred being those created before March 13, when it was first announced that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1, and those belonging to people who have recently sent them donations. They are open to selling the project to someone who will keep it open, but they made it clear that they want to continue using it, so the sale is only an option if someone will persuade them over these two weeks that they’re willing and able to make the site capable of handling all existing and future users while returning it to the speed and reliability it used to have before this influx of Google Reader “refugees”, preserving all current functionality for free accounts and preferably making improvements as well, though such new features may require payment.

This is sad, but not particularly unexpected. After the recent downtime, lasting more than two days and caused by four SSDs failing within hours of each other after an update they implemented in an attempt to better handle all the data, it could be hoped that the worst was over, but at the same time that event could and should have been seen as a sign of things to come. After all, with the number of active users and the amount of data constantly increasing and them unable to even implement the measures they had worked out to handle the situation, it was only going to get worse and yesterday’s downtime was likely enough proof of that to convince them that there’s no way they can deal with the situation. They never actually said what caused that crash, but it lasted quite a while and a brief announcement about the closure was displayed as soon as the site recovered, with the blog post detailing the reasons following shortly.
Granted, the reasons given are largely personal, but they are entirely understandable. Nobody should sacrifice their personal life like this; nobody should put this much time and effort into anything, much less into a project that isn’t exactly saving the world, recovering a species from the brink of extinction, regenerating a heavily damaged ecosystem, finding a cure for a deadly disease, eliminating poverty or something of that sort. This was a personal project that had gotten completely out of hand and there was no way for the original team to still manage it, which also meant that they became unable to develop the additional features required to switch from an entirely free to a freemium model, as they were planning, and therefore didn’t have the funds to hire additional people.
It does show a lack of planning though. Many agree that The Old Reader is clearly the best direct replacement for Google Reader, even some of those who chose other services admitting that they largely did so simply because those were faster and more reliable and not because they found the features more suited to their needs and tastes, and yet they only got a small part of the “refugees”, so it could have been much worse than this and they should have planned for it during those three and a half months between the initial announcement and the actual closure of Google Reader. Since it was largely a personal project, it’s not exactly inexcusable that they didn’t, but it is very disappointing and needing to give up on it after less than a month of feeling the strain will look terrible on their “record” if they’ll ever want to start or otherwise play a major part in a serious project in the future.

Either way, unless they will miraculously find that buyer to meet all their demands during this short time, this leaves me and over 400000 others, or at least that large part of them who were actively using The Old Reader now and didn’t simply make an account but eventually choose one of the other options, in need of yet another RSS reader, and with less than two weeks to find it. Suggestions are welcome, but please don’t mention Feedly or anything else that is or may be seen as having an interface better suited for smartphones or tablets, or is clearly focused on the “social” aspect.