feedpath

» see feedpath.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Two months after it launched, feedpath was crawling 46,000 registered sites and pulling in half a million articles a day. At the press conference where that number was announced, somebody asked how many people were reading all of it. The company said about a few thousand.

It was a browser-based RSS reader, and in January 2006 that was still something you could build a company around. Cybozu launched it on 30 January as its first serious move into consumer internet services, free, running inside Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 1.5 with nothing to install. The launch release claimed that the technique called Ajax delivered handling that would not lose to client software, a sentence that dates the document as precisely as a carbon test.

Three months later the service was moved out into a company of its own. Blogengine, Inc., a NetAge-backed startup founded on 5 April 2005, was renamed feedpath, Inc. on 3 April 2006 and took the reader with it, Cybozu holding half the shares after an investment that February. The stated goal was a million members within three years, with losses expected for the whole of that run. Capital was 50 million yen.

~ the dossier ~

~ the clean screen ~

The competition feedpath actually had was domestic. ITmedia's July 2006 round-up of Japanese-built readers ranked Hatena RSS second by share behind Bloglines, and described feedpath by its blog-posting features rather than by its reading. Google Reader does not appear in that article at all. The reader wars remembered outside Japan were being fought between a different set of products, in a different language, and the two sets barely touched.

What the company kept returning to was what the screen did not have. The launch release promised a simple design with banner advertising and unnecessary icons eliminated outright, so that nothing would break a reader's concentration. There was a Smart Sidebar that reordered your feeds by unread count, and social tags that were shared across every user instead of kept private. Feeds were public by default, each one showing how many subscribers it had. The crawl ran every twenty minutes.

~ 173 days ~

On 9 November 2007 Yahoo! JAPAN took feedpath Rabbit into its official service lineup, in a joint announcement. Yahoo! JAPAN IDs would federate straight into the reader, which would sit alongside 68 other Yahoo services and 20.31 million active accounts, and Yahoo opened an RSS portal of its own the same day. The published target was 70 million feed views a month within one year.

The closure was announced 144 days later, on 1 April 2008. The service stopped on 30 April, 173 days after the Yahoo deal, and it still carried a beta label on the day it closed. Rabbit itself had only existed for a year and twenty days: the original feedpath launched in January 2006, and Rabbit was the April 2007 rebuild, shipped alongside a sibling called feedpath Skunk, a feed database holding ten million feeds that supplied it. Both were switched off together, in one notice.

~ time to market ~

The notice does give a reason. Most shutdown notices manage without one. To keep growing as a leading company in an expanding SaaS market, it said, a venture spirit mattered, and it named that spirit in English: Time to Market, Time to Volume, Time to Money. The know-how built up running feedpath Rabbit, together with its business and engineering resources, was being redirected into the SaaS business. They shut the reader down in order to redeploy the staff who ran it.

Users got an OPML export and an instruction to take their subscriptions somewhere else. The two notices disagreed with each other about the deadline, the first saying 29 April and the final one 30 April. After that everything went. Registration details and blog editor entries were both destroyed, and the company stated plainly that deleted data could not be recovered.

The company outlasted the reader by five years. Yahoo! JAPAN bought more than 85 percent of feedpath, Inc. on 28 April 2011 and the remainder within weeks. The last product standing, feedpath Calendar, was announced closing on 1 April 2013 and shut on 30 September. Both of this company's shutdown announcements, five years apart, were dated the first of April.

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