Syndic8

» see syndic8.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Nobody has a Syndic8 story. That is not a knock on it, it is what the thing was for. When you typed a site name into your reader's add-feed box and got back a list of choices, the list came from here. All the work happened one layer under whatever you were actually looking at, which is how a database holding half a million feeds managed to leave almost no memory of itself behind.

Jeff Barr started building it in August 2001, a year before he joined Amazon as a web services evangelist and three years before he started the blog that turned him into the public face of cloud computing. Bill Kearney came in alongside him, and the copyright line at the bottom of every page carried both names until the last day. It was PHP and MySQL over a table of feeds that people submitted by hand.

Every feed got a number. The homepage had a box that said Go to Feed ID and nothing else, and by 2012 the counter had run past 412,000. Categories were borrowed from the DMOZ scheme. A feed could ping the site over XML-RPC when it changed, and it carried a rolling measurement of how often its server actually answered. There was a web services interface so other programs could ask the directory questions without a human in the loop, which most of them did.

The honest answer to whether I used Syndic8 is that I do not know. A directory you reach through somebody else's dialog box leaves no login behind it and no habit, so there is nothing to remember it by. My own list got built the slow way instead, one orange button at a time on sites I already read, and it never occurred to me to wonder where a reader was getting its suggestions from.

It outlasted the business it served. Bloglines was switched off in 2010 and Google Reader was announced dead in March 2013, and Syndic8 was still up and still taking submissions. Then in the autumn of that year it put a notice on the front page and never took it down.

~ the record ~

~ a feed was a number ~

The design assumption was that feeds are not websites. A website has a name you remember; a feed is a URL that a program reads, so what it needs is an integer and a record of whether it was up yesterday. Syndic8 gave every one of them both, and it gave you a public page per feed showing the history of that server's behavior. Nothing else on the web was keeping that kind of ledger.

The most-subscribed list on the site is the best thing in its archive. In the summer of 2012 the top feed was a Scotsman.com page about the Atkins diet, at 207,514 subscriptions. Slashdot came second at 189,657, with Wired News under that and the rest of the technology press below them. A directory built by two engineers for the technology crowd had its single most subscribed item coming from a Scottish newspaper's low-carb section, and the numbers had been sitting that way for years.

~ the two names at the bottom of the page ~

Barr joined Amazon in August 2002 and spent the next two decades explaining what a web service was to anyone who would sit still. He is the reason a generation of engineers know what an availability zone is. That whole career ran on top of a small idea he had already shipped in his own time: put the machine-readable things in one place and give them stable identifiers, so that programs can ask.

Kearney kept the lights on. The site's later years read like maintenance rather than product work, with the feed count climbing and the interface staying exactly where it was in 2004. That is a defensible way to run infrastructure and it is also how a project ends up with no owner who is looking at it on the day it stops.

~ we'll be right back ~

The archive holds a fully working Syndic8 on 27 July 2013, with the random-feeds panel populated and the submission form live. The next capture that renders is from 5 October. By then the whole site had been replaced with a short page reading "We'll be Right Back" over a single line: Syndic8 is offline, database backup in process. The 2001 to 2013 copyright notice was still underneath it.

There are no captures of a working site after that, and the availability index returns the same October 2013 snapshot for every date you ask it about afterward, which is what the archive does when nothing further exists. In 2026 syndic8.com does not resolve at all. Twelve years of a maintenance notice that was telling the truth when it went up, left standing as the last thing the site had to say.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »