ReadBurner is Gone
The popular RSS aggregator web site, ReadBurner is no more. Today, the site's homepage reads:
"I'm sorry to announce that ReadBurner is no longer availiable. The reason is that I just don't have time to keep the site up and running, because of some freelance projects that I cannot drop out. I really want to thank all of you guys for supporting me, giving me feedback and visiting ReadBurner. It's been very exiting to run a website that got so much Buzz from the blogosphere in such a short period of time. If you are still interested in the idea of ReadBurner I suggest you to try out RSSmeme which is a very well done clone of ReadBurner developed by Benjamin Golub."
ReadBurner was certainly an interesting project (our coverage) and really showed us some cool ways to view and read feeds. The site, which showed popular items shared publicly from Google Reader's Shared Items, was a favorite of many RSS users. ReadBurner would sort RSS feeds that Google Reader users shared into "Popular" and "Upcoming" categories, similar to the way Digg does, while showing the number of shares for each item.
So now, with the closing of ReadBurner, we're left with RSSmeme for our aggregated RSS reading. Although this site has no "Upcoming" Category, its "Most Recent" category essentially shows the same thing. The "Popular this Week" and "Most Popular" categories show the items with the most action and number of shares they each received. RSSmeme also shows which users shared the item and it allows for users to leave comments about the story on the RSSmeme homepage. Another nice feature of RSSmeme is the "Explore" feature, which allows you to "read more of this story" or "explore similar stories," using links placed below the story itself.
The RSSmeme site's display can be customized to show the number of stories and minimum amount of shares you would like to see displayed on the page, and, whether customized or not, each page has its own RSS feed. While reading through the shared items, you can set the preview setting to show none of the story's text, some of it, or a full preview, a feature usually found only in desktop readers like FeedDemon.
It's a shame that ReadBurner had to shut down, but as long as we have RSSmeme, I guess we will survive.The ReadBurner domain name and technology it uses is up for sale, if you're interested. An email address for more information is on the ReadBurner homepage.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Thanks for writing about RSSmeme! It is a shame that ReadBurner had to be shut down. RSSmeme is (most likely) here to stay though.
popurls has launched a popularity ranking feature last week.
Try OpenBurner, available soon.
The death of Readburner brings into focus a very important question. How can I rely on a web service offered by a small startups whose longevity cannot be ascertained. Readburner is a different kinda web service where we do not upload huge amounts of data. What about those two people web services where we invest our time and upload all our data? How can we rely on such companies with our valuable data? Should we wait for some big companies like Google to acquire the service before we start investing our time?
These questions bring to forefront two of the important ideas in the technology world, Open source and Data Portability. All the web services should offer a way to take your data with us using open standards. This will ensure that we will have our data in the event of a web service shutting its shop. The second important point is that these web services should consider releasing their code in one of the open source licenses. Right now, some of the web services release their code under open source licenses. For example, if wordpress.com or wikidot.com or wik.is is going to shut the shop tomorrow, nothing will happen to me except a few hours of downtime. I can take my data from these web services in an open format, use their released source code to install the software on one of my servers or somewhere in the cloud and, more importantly, my life will not get affected. How cool is that? I hope that all the mom and pop web services startups take the option of data portability seriously and consider releasing their source code to public, at least, when they shut their shop.
ReadBurner is back :)