The Old Reader team takes a U-turn; announces RSS reader may be open to public in future

Nearly a week after a long and agitated post announcing that RSS service The Old Reader would be shutting registrations and pulling support for some users, the team has written a new post announcing that the service will be back.

In a short and succinct post, the team wrote that it was “quite confident” that the public version of The Old Reader will be available in the future, now that there is a proper team running it. While the team has said that there will be more details available this week, they did not elaborate on how they managed to put together a new one to run it.

Flip-flop

Earlier this week, the team running the RSS reader had come out to announce that it would be halting registrations for people who wanted to sign up for the service. The Old Reader was also going to pull support for users who had joined in after March 13, 2013 – the day before Google announced that it was killing off its RSS aggregator, Google Reader.
The demise of Google Reader has a huge part to play in The Old Reader’s flip-flop over shutting its services. After Google Reader’s imminent death was announced, a whole lot of users in disbelief turned to look at other RSS services to get their daily dose of aggregated news. There were a host of RSS services apart from Google Reader, serving a smaller bunch of users, with an even smaller team to keep it up and running. The exodus to other readers meant the small team was being incapable of dealing with so many users. The Old Reader was a victim of exactly this fatigue.

The team decided to pull support to anyone who joined in after Google Reader’s death was announced, effectively providing services to the users who had chosen to join The Old Reader for itself and not as a Google Reader replacement.

Thankfully, the team seems to have found some sort of support in the form of newer members joining it. There is a great possibility that the reader might go public again; only this time, it will see a huge influx of newer users who had not heard about the service before. Whoever said there’s no such thing as bad publicity was pretty bang on.