Snarfer

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

~ the eulogy ~

Snarfware, LLC was incorporated in December 2004 with offices listed in Boston and London, and it announced a free RSS reader for Windows in the last quarter of 2005. The product was called Snarfer. Its logo was a green blob with eyes. It ran on XP or higher and the installers were digitally signed. The download never cost anything at any point in its life.

The pitch was speed and the absence of everything else. The homepage promised no fluff and no wasted motion, and made a specific point of requiring no .NET runtime and bundling no toolbar. In 2006 both of those were real complaints about real competitors. Underneath the pitch it was a serious piece of software. It synced with Bloglines and handled OPML in both directions. It could detect the same story arriving through several feeds at once, and it ran keyword watches across a whole folder. Pages loaded in an embedded browser so you never left the app. There were plugins that turned eBay and Craigslist searches into feeds, and a wiki for people writing more of them.

By the time the house had a broadband line and I had a reason to check fifty sites a day, a desktop feed reader was simply what you used. Mine was one of the Windows ones. I cannot tell you it was this one, and that is the honest shape of this grave. Snarfer spent eight years telling everybody it was the most downloaded desktop RSS reader on the internet. I was exactly the person it was describing, and the name brings back nothing at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ frozen at 1.0.2 ~

The change log is the whole story on one page. Version 1.0.0 arrived on 8 April 2008 with feed auto-discovery and background tabs. Version 1.0.2 arrived on 15 June 2008. It added keyword watches on individual feeds and taught the reader to treat an rdf:about attribute as a unique identifier. Then the log stops. Whatever happened at Snarfware in the second half of 2008, the result was that nobody ever compiled another release, and nobody took the page down either.

~ no fluff, no wasted motion ~

What makes the next five years strange is that the site kept selling. The title tag read "Leading RSS Reader since 2005" into 2011. The body copy still asked what you had to lose and still called Snarfer the internet's most popular desktop RSS reader, in the present tense, years after the last build. There were pages for press releases, a license, a legal notice, a technical white paper, a custom-build offer for publishers and a rate card for advertisers. Every one of those pages stayed online. None of them had been true since 2008.

Bloglines, the service Snarfer synced with, shut down in 2010. That should have been the end, since the sync was half of what made a desktop reader worth running in a world that had moved to the cloud. It did not change anything, because there was nobody left to change anything.

~ the march nobody noticed ~

The Internet Archive crawled snarfware.com roughly once a month for years, and the last time it got a page back was 8 March 2013. April and May returned failures, one of them a 403. From June 2013 the domain answered only with redirects, and today it forwards to Google. Five days after that final successful crawl, on 13 March 2013, Google announced it was killing Google Reader, and FeedDemon, the best-known Windows desktop reader, was discontinued within days because its sync depended on Reader. The two deaths sit a working week apart and have nothing to do with each other. FeedDemon was switched off on purpose by an author who explained why. Snarfer had been dead for five years and simply stopped paying for the room.

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