Time to say goodbye
All,
Due to some overwhelming personal/family issues, it is with regret that I announce the closure of FeedLounge as of June 1st, 2007. I have been trying to develop new features and support FeedLounge in my spare time, but the toll of a new child, and a job, and now a serious injury in the family requires all of the rest of my attention. Something had to give.
All annual subscribers that are currently active will be fully refunded their pro-rated subscription after they have cancelled with PayPal. I am in contact with PayPal to attempt a mass-cancellation, but it seems that is not possible, at least with the support people I have talked with. If anyone has pointers, feel free to comment here and let me know. I will at a minimum remove the PayPal notification backchannel on June 1st.
If anyone is interested in buying and taking over FeedLounge, please contact me and we can discuss. We have also developed a FeedLounge V2 UI that is backend agnostic, using all the latest bells and whistles (YUI-ext, client side caching, etc).
Scott, I am so sorry to hear about the family issues and wish you all the best. FL was great while it lasted, and by far had the best potential of any web-based feed reader on the market. I hope someone can pick of the pieces and right this ship.
Thanks for the kind words Chris. I agree with what you have said, it just takes more than one person to run a feed service acceptably well.
FeedLounge is a great platform with great possibilities. I hope that someone can make that leap and start running it. There is so much that can happen!
Scott: How do we get in touch with you in order to discuss the possibility of purchasing and taking over FeedLounge? I am genuinely interested and would love to talk to you about this.
If you are serious, please send email to scott at stonecobra daht com. Thanks.
What about open sourcing it? Letting a community manage the feature updates and such and you charge as a hosting provider and lead programmer.
For the record: my relationship with Scott and Alex is the only reason that I did feedlounge.info for free. I expect that any sales of FL to a third party might want to keep fl.info available, but I’m not going to host that for free.
First sorry to hear that Scott has to abandon this. I’m sure he enjoyed managing feedlounge and one can see that in the product he has.
I would also second Dan’s opinion to open source it while Scott can still maintain control over the development. However, one thing to lookout for is that if in future Scott plans to see feedlounge then he should cover his tracks so contributors do not start demanding a cut.
I would also be interested in purchasing the code if possible or entering into a partnership relationship with Scott. However, I will contact Scott about the same.
I’m sure we as a community can make sure that feedlounge keeps going and helps a lot of web 2.0 users.
Scott,
I wish you and your family all the best, and I hope that whoever was injured gets well soon and will recover fully.
Now here’s hoping that someone takes over FL and keeps it running. It’s hands down the best feed reader out there.
Scott,
Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to work on such a great project. It was really satisfying to be a part of something that so much care and thought went into - something other feed readers seem to lack. I hope everything with your family turns out as best as possible and that StoneCobra is going strong. If it does get open sourced, I would b happy to lend a hand in all my “free” time.
-Brian
I have never used FL, but I subscribe to Alex’s feed. And I just wanted ot wish all of your family all the best of luck in this traumatic period.
-Birger
Geof,
Many thanks for hosting feedlounge.info, it was one of the most usable tools we had for the community. And sorry about the whole Scott DOS attack thing.
Scott: As bad as the accidental DOS-by-Scott was, it had nothing on the Digg/BoingBoing’ing I got last week for LOLTrek.
Seeing that there are suitors for FeedLounge.com, I’ll probably hold off on a 1 Jun Big Red Button party so that whoever owns the service going forward has ample time to move things about.