The RSS curse: Google Reader replacement shuts down too

The RSS frenzy has claimed yet another victim after Google had to shut its Reader service. The Old Reader, a popular RSS aggregator service has announced that it is closing down registration on its public site citing exhaustion as the reason for doing so.

The team announced in a blog post that it was shutting down registrations for the website and you will no longer be able to create an account on The Old Reader anymore. They seem to have taken the decision to shut out users who joined the service in March, after months of “nightmare” that followed Google’s announcement of shutting Reader down.

No more available

Ever since Google announced that Reader was shutting down, loyal users of the service have been clamouring to find replacement services for their RSS feeds. The Old Reader was one such lucrative service and users signed up for it in hordes. The service, run by Ukrainians Elena Bulygina and Dmitry Krasnoukhov, was working in “normal” mode till the announcement and started to see users pouring in. It is currently serving 4,20,000 users with 80,000 daily active ones.

Since the team has been pressed for time with new users coming in, it has decided to pull the plug on part of the service’s users. Users who signed up for the service after March 13, 2013 – the day before Google announced the killing of Google Reader – will see The Old Reader abandoning them too. Users who were on the site before this date will automatically be migrated to the private website and will have support. Users who sent in donations, including Bitcoins, will also be added to the whitelist.

Users who were on the service looking for a “Google Reader replacement” will have two weeks to export their OPML file. The team wrote that it wishes The Old Reader would become a big and successful project with usable free accounts but someone resourceful will need to take over the project. The blog post also contains information to get in touch with the team in case someone wishes to buy out the service. If that does end up happening, users might not have to scramble to find yet another replacement for their RSS readers.