twitterfeed

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

~ the eulogy ~

twitterfeed did one job. You handed it the address of an RSS feed and the keys to a social account, and from then on anything new in the feed turned up as a post without you touching it. In 2007 that was the missing piece between the two halves of being online: people had blogs that produced feeds, and they had a Twitter account that produced nothing unless they typed into it.

Mario Menti started it in March 2007 from London. The numbers are the strange part. The service ran at roughly two million users pushing something like five million posts a day, against a company that was one person. A large share of what looked like activity on Twitter in those years was a feed item arriving on a schedule nobody was watching.

Bitly bought it in August 2011. The trade press was unsentimental about what kind of purchase it was, calling it an acqhire, since twitterfeed consisted of Menti and his code. He stayed on as head of twitterfeed inside Bitly and was still in that role five years later, until the month the service closed.

This one carried no geography, which is worth noting on a site that usually has to explain why a product never arrived. A feed URL behaved the same on a TTNet connection in Ankara as it did in California, because there was nothing to localize and nothing to license. The things that kept most of the era's services out of Turkey were carrier deals and content rights, and twitterfeed had neither.

~ the dossier ~

~ one man and five million posts ~

The economics of a service like this only work while nobody has to pay attention to it. Posting a feed item costs almost nothing per item, so one operator can carry millions of them, right up to the moment the platform on the receiving end changes its rules and somebody has to go and fix the integration. Twitter spent the early 2010s tightening what automated clients were allowed to do, and every tightening was work that landed on whoever owned twitterfeed.

What Bitly got was a pipe pointed at the same social accounts its links were already traveling through. What it did not get was a business that wanted to grow, and the copyright line on the homepage quietly records how long the interest lasted: it reads 2007 to 2015, on a service that kept running into late 2016.

~ the door that stayed open ~

twitterfeed stopped on 31 October 2016. Users were told by email, and the recommendation was to move to another service, with dlvr.it named on the site itself and Buffer mentioned alongside it in the coverage. Menti's own tenure at Bitly ended the same month, which is the tidiest possible summary of what the product was by then.

Ten years on, twitterfeed.com still answers. The page that loads is the original homepage rather than a parking page, and the first thing on it is the notice: we have shut our doors, please move your twitter feeds to another service, we recommend dlvr.it, thanks for all the twitter feeds. Under that line the site still lays out the three steps for getting started, still offering to create your account and track your feeds in real time.

As afterlives go it is an unusually courteous one. Most services this size took the domain down inside a year, and the ones that outlast themselves normally come back as something unrelated. twitterfeed just left the lights on with a sign in the window.

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