Livedoor Reader

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

~ the obituary ~

When Google shut Reader down in the summer of 2013, the english-speaking web scattered. everyone i knew went looking for a new place to keep their feeds, and half of them never really settled. Japan did not scatter. it already had its own reader, faster than Google's, and it held onto it for four more years after ours was gone. i never saw a single screen of it, because the whole thing ran in a language i cannot read.

this is the outside view, put together from the record. Livedoor Reader launched in April 2006, built by Livedoor, one of the big japanese web portals of the 2000s. it was a browser-based feed reader with a reputation for speed and for a keyboard-first design, the kind of thing a heavy reader flew through without touching the mouse. it had an open-source twin released to the wider world under the name Fastladder, which is the closest most non-japanese users ever got to it.

Livedoor itself had a rough decade, its parent company gutted by a fraud scandal in 2006 and the pieces eventually folding into what became LINE. the reader survived all of that. in December 2014 its operation was handed to Dwango, the company behind Niconico, and it was renamed Live Dwango Reader. same tool, new landlord. it even had a phone version, LDR Pocket, for reading on the train.

what finally killed it was the same slow tide that took every feed reader. RSS stopped being how most people found things. Dwango said the user count had fallen a long way in recent years and that the service had done its job, and on the 31st of August 2017 it closed, phone app and all. Japan had held onto its reader longer than almost anyone, and then it let go too.

~ the case file ~

~ what got buried with it ~

when a feed reader dies, the loss is quiet but real. it was the one place a person had gathered every site they cared about into a single ordered list, with no algorithm deciding the order for them. Live Dwango Reader was one of the last of that kind still running at scale, and its fans knew it. someone built a clone called Irodr just to keep the exact feel of the keyboard shortcuts alive after the original went dark.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part, from where i sat, is that the best of these readers was one i could not use. i spent the years after Google Reader bouncing between the ones that shipped in english, and the whole time there was a faster, better-loved one running fine on the other side of a script i cannot read. it outlived Google's by four years and most of its western rivals by more. the language wall meant i only found out it existed once it was already a shutdown notice i had to run through a translator.

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