The Outliner of Giants

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

~ the obituary ~

The Outliner of Giants was browser-based outlining software, released in 2009 by a UK company called Angelic Informatics, and named for the line about standing on the shoulders of giants. An outliner is a program for documents whose structure is a nested list. You write items and nest them under other items, promoting or demoting as the shape of the thing changes under you. People who use one tend to use it for everything.

Most browser-based outliners of that era were deliberately minimal and this one went the other way, carrying the feature set people expected from a desktop program. The part that stands out is real-time collaboration, where two people could watch each other edit the same outline, which shipped years before that was ordinary in a web application.

It ran on Google App Engine and it never worked offline. An outline you cannot open on a train is a real limitation for the kind of person who buys an outliner, and the documentation said so plainly rather than hiding it. On 31 December 2017 the service closed. The export stayed switched on afterward, so the ending was an instruction rather than a lockout: take your OPML and go.

~ the case file ~

~ who an outliner is for ~

There is a small and durable community around this category of software, with its own forum at outlinersoftware.com where threads about individual programs run for a decade without closing. The Outliner of Giants has one there that was started in 2014. That is the audience a product like this is built for, and it is both why it existed and why it stayed the size it did. A few hundred people who care enormously is a business, but a very small one.

~ the last export ~

The site kept answering for three years after the service closed, serving a 4 KB shell whose markup still declared Angelic Informatics LTD as the owner and pointed at a support page. The captures run to December 2020. Today the domain does not resolve at all.

What it left behind is an OPML file on somebody's disk, which is exactly what OPML is for. Outliners were among the first web applications to take data portability seriously, because the people who use them have been carrying the same outline between programs since the 1980s and will not adopt anything they cannot leave. A shutdown that keeps the export running for the people who stayed is about as decent an ending as this kind of software gets.

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