Zhuaxia

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

~ the last words ~

Xu Yirong read computer science at Peking University and took a master's at Stanford, then came home and started Zhuaxia with Chen Zhenyu at the end of 2005. What they built was an RSS reader that ran in a browser. You gave it feeds and it fetched them on a schedule, putting the Chinese web in one column in the order you asked for rather than the order somebody's homepage editor had chosen.

The timing was very good. Chinese blogging was at its loudest through 2006 and 2007, the portals were slow to load and slower to change, and a reader that pulled from a thousand independent sites at once looked like a genuine alternative to opening Sina or Sohu and reading whatever had been placed at the top. People in the industry started describing Zhuaxia as a disruptor of the four major portals, which is an enormous thing to say about a site run by two people.

For roughly two years it was also defensible. Zhuaxia was the quickest of the Chinese readers and the best looking one, and it cost nothing to use. The one thing it never had was a way to charge anybody for any of it.

~ the record ~

~ the disruptor label ~

Being the reader for the technical crowd is a trap, because the technical crowd is not a market. Advertising against an audience of engineers and bloggers pays badly, and RSS itself never got past people who already knew what a feed was. Xu said afterward that he had picked the wrong direction and built something too technical instead of going with the current. He left, co-founded the fashion site Meilishuo, and reached the audience Zhuaxia could not: people who had never heard of a feed and did not need to.

~ what douban bought ~

From 2008 the company stopped making money and did not start again. Core staff went elsewhere, the product stopped changing, and early in 2009 Zhuaxia was sold to Douban, which confirmed it publicly on 25 May 2010. Douban had its own reading product in 豆瓣九点 and the stated plan was to combine the two. What actually happened is that Zhuaxia stayed online for six more years, logging people in and fetching their feeds, receiving almost nothing.

I was reading feeds in those same years, first Bloglines and then Google Reader, over a TTNet line in Ankara, with a list of maybe a dozen English and Turkish blogs I opened daily. Zhuaxia's entire catalog was in a script I cannot read, which is a wall no line upgrade removes. The Chinese web of 2007 was as large and as loud as the one I had, and none of it reached me.

~ the last email ~

On 5 August 2015 Zhuaxia emailed its remaining users to say the service would close on 20 August and that anything worth keeping should be exported now. Two weeks of notice against nine years of accumulated subscriptions. Google Reader had gone in July 2013 and had taken most of the surviving argument for feed reading with it, so by 2015 the announcement read less like a shock than like a delayed formality.

zhuaxia.com does not resolve today.

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