Fastladder

» see fastladder.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Livedoor Reader was the feed reader Japan actually used, and its reputation was speed. It was built for the keyboard and it did not flinch at a thousand subscriptions. Heavy readers flew through it without touching the mouse. On 3 July 2007 livedoor translated that interface into English and pointed the whole thing at the rest of the world under a new name.

Fastladder was the same product behind a different front door, down to needing its own account rather than a livedoor ID. The company set itself a target of 100,000 members in six months, which was not arrogance: livedoor Reader had passed 100,000 users in the eight months after its own launch in April 2006. The archive first finds fastladder.com answering on 30 June 2007 with a 312-byte placeholder, and serving the real sign-up page by 7 July, footer reading "© 2007 livedoor Co.,Ltd."

In February 2008 livedoor did something few companies do. The entire reader, Ruby on Rails and JavaScript, went up on Google Code under an MIT license, with installable packages for desktop machines so you could run a private copy against an intranet. The company's own advice was to stay on the hosted version unless you specifically needed that. Handing out a working copy of your own service is a strange thing to do, and it is why the software outlived the company.

By the time the hosted service closed in mid-2012 it belonged to NHN Japan Corp, the owner livedoor had been folded into, and that company renamed itself LINE the following year. The Japanese original outlived its English twin by more than five years, running on as Live Dwango Reader until the last day of August 2017.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the english twin ~

Almost nothing in English was written about Fastladder while it was alive, and the Wikipedia article covering it is in Japanese. The coverage it did get treated it as a Japanese company's foreign ambition rather than as a product English speakers might use, and the English-speaking web mostly never found out it existed. The grave for Livedoor Reader in this archive gives Fastladder a single clause, which is about what it got at the time.

~ may 31st and june 1st ~

There are two dates on the closure and they disagree by a day for a reason worth keeping. The notice that went up by 12 May 2012 is forward-looking: "Fastladder will no longer be available starting on May 31st, 2012", with instructions to download your subscription list from the export page before then, and a warning that export would be impossible afterward. That is a last day of service, announced at least three weeks in advance.

The page that replaced it reads differently. By 8 June that address had a full-size tombstone on it: "Fastladder has been permanently closed as of 1st June 2012. we greatly appreciate your support and contributions. The Fastladder Team at NHN Japan Corp." The apex had started redirecting into it. So 31 May was the last day you could log in, and 1 June is the date the company itself put on the death. The second one is what the gravestone says, so that is the one on this page.

~ the code outlived the service ~

Fastladder's stated ambition was 100,000 members in six months, and nobody outside Tokyo ever published whether it got there. In 2007 I was reading feeds the way most people outside Japan were, which is to say in Google Reader, and the first time I encountered this name was while going through a list of dead readers years later. The domain is gone from DNS now and the closure page it served for eight years went with it. The repository did not. The MIT release from February 2008 is on GitHub and still installs as a Rails application. Running it is the closest anyone can get now to the interface Japan was reading on while the rest of us waited for Google to close its own reader.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »