Rojo

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

~ the goodbye ~

Six Apart bought Rojo on 6 September 2006 and used the same announcement to say it had no plans to keep building it. The coverage read like a hiring notice with a domain attached to it. Four people crossed over into Six Apart: Chris Alden, Aaron Emigh, Andrew Bunner and Jim Ramsey.

Rojo Networks started in June 2003 in San Francisco. Alden had co-founded Red Herring before this and Emigh came in as the technical half. The reader went to closed beta in October 2004 and opened to everybody in April 2005, free, running entirely in a browser at a moment when most people still read feeds in a program they had installed.

It was third in a two-horse race. Bloglines had the web-based crowd and NewsGator had the desktop and the enterprise money, and both of them had arrived first. Rojo's answer was to be the sociable one. You could tag any story and leave comments on it for other subscribers, and a panel called Rojo Buzz read the link graph of everything its own users had subscribed to and told you what was moving. In August 2005 it added a top 100 feeds list built off the same data.

Then Google Reader landed at the end of 2005 and the question of what a feed reader cost stopped being a question. Six Apart said after the purchase that it planned to sell a majority stake in the newsreader within months and become a minority holder of the thing it had just bought. No buyer was ever named. Alden ran Six Apart as chief executive from September 2006 until October 2010, when the company was sold to VideoEgg.

The reading list is the part I keep coming back to. In 2006 I had a ttnet line at home that could finally hold a web application open all day, and a reader was a reasonable thing for a computer engineering student to want. What Rojo was selling on top of the reading was other people, and the other people it had were the American technology blog crowd talking to each other. Around me the shared reading happened on MSN, one link at a time, pasted into a window. The social half of a social reader is not something you can install.

~ the chronicle ~

~ rss with mojo ~

The name was a joke that explains the product. Everything Rojo built sat one layer above the feed: you could tag any story, and the tags were public, so a tag page became a small hand-made section of the web with several people filling it. Subscriptions were visible to the people you had connected to, which meant your reading list doubled as a recommendation.

Reviewers at the time liked the tags and found the rest heavy. A feed reader is a tool people open forty times a day, and every social feature is a thing to decide about on each of those forty visits. The version of the idea that survived was the small one: a share button, and a public page of the items you had starred. Google Reader shipped exactly that and it took.

~ four names in the announcement ~

Nobody printed the price. The number that circulated was under five million dollars, which for a venture-funded company with a running product and a beta list is not a good outcome and is not a wipeout either. What Six Apart wanted was legible from the wording: it took the team into its own executive layer and put the product on the market the same week.

This is the shape a lot of the feed layer went out in. Bloglines sold to Ask Jeeves in February 2005 and got switched off in 2010, and NewsGator gave up on consumers to become an enterprise software company under a different name. In every one of those deals the people found somewhere to land and the product did not. Nobody was buying readers.

~ where the domain went ~

There was no shutdown notice. The archive holds a working Rojo at rojo.com through 29 July 2008, and the next capture, on 7 September, is a redirect to blogs.com, another Six Apart property. Somewhere in those six weeks the reader stopped and the domain was pointed at a directory of other people's blogs.

That is a quieter ending than the ones people remember from this category, and it is probably the common one. A reader with a few tens of thousands of accounts does not get a farewell post. It gets a DNS change on a Tuesday, and the only record that it stopped is a gap between two crawls.

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