HanRSS

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

~ the eulogy ~

Korean feed readers are not a category anyone outside Korea had to think about, and HanRSS is the one that mattered inside it. It was written 한RSS in Korean and HanRSS in the Latin alphabet, the wordmark setting Han in orange with a small signal arc over the a. The whole product was one man's.

Seo Seong-ryeol left Neowiz after about four and a half years, two and a half in Seoul and roughly two more at the company's Japanese subsidiary. He spent six months doing various things, then wrote HanRSS in about a month and opened it in October 2005. He has named his influences: Bloglines in America, and Allblog at home. His point of difference was that almost everyone in Korea was running a feed reader installed on their own machine, and his was on the web.

It did what the category did. Keyboard shortcuts, OPML in and out, a bookmarklet for subscribing, mobile and iPhone builds later on. There was a guide drawn as a webtoon by the artist Wonsound, who did it for nothing, so Seo put it on the site. Aruworks was incorporated in July 2007 and had four people for about three years. From the autumn of 2010 it was him on his own, which is how the last five years were run.

He never made money from it. He has said that in as many words, and added the part that is funnier and sadder than the fact itself: people took the closure well, he thinks, precisely because he had obviously never been monetizing it, and that had he made money out of ten years of this, somebody was bound to call him a runner.

~ the dossier ~

~ nine years of borrowed servers ~

The thing that makes HanRSS worth a page is in its own farewell notice, in a list most people reading it probably skimmed. Seo thanks, by name and by date, the companies that gave him the server infrastructure that kept it running:

Cheotnun, from March 2006 to July 2006. NCsoft's Openmaru Studio, from August 2006 to May 2010. Neowiz Internet, from June 2010 to May 2015. Cheotnun was the Korean search startup NHN bought in 2006, the same year its four-month stint on that list ends. So for more than nine years, a feed reader used by a sizable share of the Korean web ran on machines belonging to three companies that were not being paid for them, handed along one to the next without a gap. He started on one server and finished on five.

~ nineteen days' notice ~

In early May 2015 the last of those donors told him it was being absorbed toward NHN and the servers had to be wound up at some point. He posted the shutdown notice on 12 May and closed the service on 31 May. That is nineteen days.

The notice gives no reason. It says the service that began in October 2005 and has been loved by many people for ten years will end on 31 May, thanks everyone, and apologizes deeply for not being able to keep it going. The explanation about the servers exists only because a journalist asked him in a cafe near Seoul National University station on 19 May and he answered. Korean Wikipedia records the complaint that followed: hardly anyone found out in time, and the window for getting your data out was criticized as far too short.

The dates are worth being exact about, because the obvious story does not fit them. Google Reader was announced dead in March 2013 and switched off that July. HanRSS outlived it by nearly two years, and neither the notice nor the interview mentions Google once.

~ the japanese edition ~

There was a Japanese HanRSS, at jp.hanrss.com, which is where those two years Seo spent at Neowiz in Japan start to matter. A Tokyo company called Mikle announced the tie-up on 25 September 2006, though the archive shows the site already running a month before that. Mikle was not small: its own message board was doing sixty million page views a month. It set itself a target of 200,000 registered Japanese users within a year.

Nobody ever said how that went. The Japanese site's last archived page is from 29 December 2011 and it is not a farewell, it is the ordinary login screen with a 2011 copyright. By mid-2012 the paths were returning errors. There is no closure notice anywhere, in any language, for the Japanese edition. It went quiet about three years before the Korean one was given its nineteen days.

~ the memento ~

Asked in that 2015 interview whether anything would be kept, Seo said he thought he would just leave the shutdown notice up as a memento.

He did. hanrss.com still resolves today, and what it answers with is exactly one page: the notice from 12 May 2015, with all 272 farewell comments underneath it, including the ones asking where everybody is supposed to go now and getting no reply. The Internet Archive's copies show the page's fingerprint locking into place in September 2015 and never changing again. The slogan graphic is still in its folder, still calling this Korea's representative RSS reader. Somebody has been paying to renew that domain for eleven years so that a goodbye can keep being readable.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »