The Old Reader Is Done … Kind of

The Old Reader is one of the Google Reader alternatives that we covered here a few weeks back. The site did have performance issues and went down hard recently. As the developers behind the site have suggested, Old Reader is shutting down and changing. Running a RSS reader service is never easy or cheap, so that decision is understandable:

The Old Reader has to change. We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running…. Accounts will be migrated to the private site automatically. We will whitelist everybody we know personally, along with all active accounts that were registered before March 13, 2013 — those are the people who had consciously signed up for The Old Reader rather than were simply looking for “a Google Reader replacement”.

The developers are looking to take care of their early supporters while waiting for a good offer to come to move the project forward.

We really want The Old Reader to be a big and successful project, with usable free accounts. But this is not possible to achieve with what we have, so unless someone resourceful takes over the project and brings it to the next level, it is not gonna happen. We had over 2 000 new registrations after the blackout last week. This is amazing and sad at the same time.

If anyone is interested in acquiring The Old Reader and making it better, we are very open and accepting proposals at hello@theoldreader.com.

Are we going to miss the Old Reader? The performance was not great. But the site did offer some useful features for bloggers looking for a Google Reader replacement. Let’s hope someone will step up to make the Old Reader better.