Reading.am

» see reading.am as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Reading.am described itself by what it was not: not what you like, and not what you find interesting. What it logged was the page sitting open in front of you, posted ideally before you had finished it, which is the one moment every other bookmarking service skips.

That ordering was the whole product. Delicious and the read-later tools captured a decision, the judgment that something was worth keeping. Reading.am captured the step before the judgment, the thing you had clicked and not yet rated. You hit the bookmarklet and the URL went into your feed, where anyone following you saw what you were in the middle of.

Greg Leppert built it in 2011 while working at Svpply, the shopping wishlist startup that has its own grave here. The first commit to the reading repository landed on 24 July 2011 and the browser extensions got their own repository that December. It stayed a one-person project for eleven years.

In 2011 I was an engineer in Ankara and the pages I read went into a bookmarks bar where they died quietly. A public feed of my own reading held no appeal at all, which is probably why this category never produced a Turkish equivalent worth naming. The audience for Reading.am was English-language and small by construction, made up almost entirely of people who wrote things on the internet for a living.

~ the record ~

~ the room it came out of ~

Leppert's own account of why he started it is short and specific. At Svpply the team "kept asking each other did you see <insert webpage here>?", so he wired the answers into a HipChat room called Reading Room. Every link anyone on the team opened showed up there as it happened.

He drew a clean line between that and publishing. Blogs and Twitter accounts were for curation, for the stuff you had already formed a position on. Reading, in his words, was "about the stuff we're ingesting, the things in-between". A company chat room full of half-read tabs turns out to be a better picture of what a team is actually thinking about than anything that team posts in public.

~ the sunset note ~

The announcement went out on Twitter on 2 June 2022 and gave everyone 28 days: "I'm sunsetting Reading.am at the end of this month. Thanks to everyone who participated, I really enjoyed building things with and for you. Data exports are available and I'll be around for support and questions."

There was no acquisition behind it and no funding collapse. A solo maintainer had carried a public service for eleven years and stopped. The exports were real and they shipped in three formats, which is more exit courtesy than most funded companies manage.

~ the code it left ~

The last pushes to the repositories are dated 6 June 2022, four days after the announcement and three weeks before the lights went out. That is the shape of a shutdown where the plan was always to hand the thing over rather than delete it, and the code sits at github.com/reading-am today.

reading.am itself now bounces to a parking lander, 114 bytes of JavaScript pointing a browser somewhere else. The service is gone and its source is not, which makes this one of the rare graves where you could rebuild the headstone if you wanted to.

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