feedalizr

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

~ the obituary ~

feedalizr was a desktop program that pulled your social accounts into one scrolling column and let you post back out to them. It arrived in April 2008 as an Adobe AIR download, which at the time was the fashionable way to put a web service on somebody's desktop without writing a native application twice. Its first and main target was FriendFeed, and it got there before anyone else did: it was the first AIR client for the service.

The team behind it was called MIH SWAT, a distributed group working out of Cape Town and São Paulo under Naspers, the South African media group. That is an unusual pedigree for a small social utility, and it explains a few things about how the thing was run, including why it was listed as commercial and why nobody ever wrote a shutdown notice. By version 2.1 in September 2008 it had full client support for Twitter and Flickr, so a FriendFeed account stopped being a requirement to use it. TechCrunch put it on a list of thirteen FriendFeed tools in June 2008, during the week Twitter's downtime was sending people looking for somewhere else to be.

Then it stopped. The product blog's last post is dated 14 August 2009, and the Wikipedia article's whole account of the ending is one sentence saying that as of 2009 it is no longer being maintained. Facebook had announced its purchase of FriendFeed on 10 August, four days earlier. The homepage carried on serving a download badge for version 2.4 until 26 March 2011; by 8 April the favicon was returning a 404 and the site had become one of those pages that just says click here to proceed.

~ the case file ~

~ the air moment ~

Adobe AIR had a window of about two years where it looked like the answer to a real question. Web applications of the day could not reach the file system or sit in the system tray, and writing a real native client meant writing it twice. AIR let a small team ship one build that ran on Windows and on Mac with the same Flash and JavaScript they already knew. Everybody's Twitter client was an AIR app for a while. Then phones arrived and the whole category went quiet.

feedalizr is a clean specimen of that window because it is dated at both ends by things outside itself. It launched during the AIR enthusiasm and it was abandoned the week its primary service was acquired.

~ the biggest friendfeed country ~

Here is the part I did not expect to find. In January 2010 TechCrunch ran a piece on Turkey as the land that embraced Facebook and FriendFeed, and the claim in it was that Turkey was the single biggest user of FriendFeed anywhere. That was my country, on my ISP, in the years I was finishing university, and the platform this program was built to serve had more of us on it than anyone else.

I never installed feedalizr, and I doubt many Turkish FriendFeed users did. The Turkish social internet of 2009 ran in a browser tab, often on a machine that was not yours, and an Adobe AIR runtime plus a desktop client was a lot of ceremony for something the web page already did. A product can be aimed exactly at a market and still miss how that market sits down at a computer.

~ the last post ~

Nobody at Naspers switched feedalizr off. It was left running, which is a different kind of ending from a shutdown notice and a cutoff date, and in some ways a worse one for anyone who was still using it. The download link worked and the version number stayed at 2.4, over a blog nobody had touched since the summer of 2009. The host finally went quiet in the first days of April 2011, somewhere between the 26 March capture and the 8 April one.

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