Lektora

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

~ the eulogy ~

Lektora did not want to be an application. It installed itself into Internet Explorer and later into Firefox and Opera, and when you opened it, your subscriptions came back as a laid-out newspaper rather than a list of unread counts. The data stayed on your own machine. Most of the program was JavaScript, which in 2004 was an eccentric choice and in hindsight was the right one.

The first version of the site, archived in October 2004, is entirely in French and describes Lektora as le lecteur francophone de fils d'information RSS, completely integrated into Internet Explorer. That is an unusual place for a feed reader to start. The company behind it was Lektora Inc. in Canada, and the French-first launch reads as a company selling to the market on its own doorstep before anywhere else.

English had taken over the front page by early 2005, and the later versions of the site carried language switchers for Chinese and Japanese too. Builds for Mac and Linux landed on 2 March 2005, and 1.0 went final and free on 18 March 2005. Free meant context-guided advertising inside the newspaper view, and $29.95 removed it. Jack Vinson, writing in July 2005, noted the thing that actually distinguished it, which was that Lektora showed you the flow of what had arrived since you last looked instead of keeping a running tally of everything unread.

The reader also read and wrote OPML, so people were moving in from Bloglines with one file. On the Windows side there was a genuine annoyance: to install it properly you needed both Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox present, because the installer hooked into each of them.

~ french first, then the bloggers ~

By March 2006 the pitch had changed completely. The page no longer led on reading. It led with RSS for bloggers, promising that one click opened a blog editor from whatever article you were looking at, and that you could post straight to the hosted platforms of the day. Underneath that was the money: Lektora offered to insert keyword-based ads into the posts you published through it and split the proceeds.

This was a reasonable guess about 2006. Everyone was looking for the business model that sat between feeds and blogging, and ad-splitting inside the publishing tool was one of the few that could have worked at small scale. Whether it ever paid anybody is not recorded anywhere I can find.

~ please contact your reseller ~

What the archive shows next is a long silence with the lights on. From 8 March 2006 to 25 August 2007 the Internet Archive fetched that homepage dozens of times and got back the identical checksum every single time. No price change and no version bump, from a company that had put out Mac and Linux builds inside its first six months. Eighteen months of a server faithfully serving a page nobody was editing.

Then on 28 September 2007 the same address returned 594 bytes: The domain "lektora.com" has expired. Please contact your reseller. Five weeks separate the last capture of the product from the first capture of the registrar's notice. This was not a shutdown; it was an invoice. By 2010 the name had been recycled into one of those keyword parking pages offering free credit reports and antivirus downloads. It is gone from DNS now.

The price tag is what puts this one out of my reach rather than the country it came from. A dollar-denominated license fee for a feed reader, in a Turkish university town in 2005, was not a line item anybody I knew carried. The free build worked, so the paid build was selling the absence of an advertisement. Lektora went on charging for that absence through the same eighteen months in which its competition settled on free and hosted, and the frozen homepage records how the argument finished.

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