Twitterfeed will be shutting its doors on October 31st, 2016 | Hacker News Reader

Twitterfeed will be shutting its doors on October 31st, 2016

33 pointshomero19 comments

Not me:

Howdy, Twitterfeeders!

We're writing to let you know that Twitterfeed will be shutting its doors on October 31st, 2016. It's been one heck of a run and we can't thank you enough for your loyal usage and support over the years.

If you're looking for a service similar to Twitterfeed to continue using in our absence, we recommend checking out the good folks at Buffer (https://buffer.com) or Dlvr.it (https://dlvr.it)

Thanks again for all the feeds!

- Mario Founder, Twitterfeed https://twitterfeed.com/ 139 5th Ave. New York, NY 10010

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Why not open source it so we can run it on our own hardware?

Why does something useful have to go away because a business couldn't be made of it?

Often open sourcing a project requires a lot of work. If it uses licensed technology it may require some money too. And sometimes the engineering is uniquely tuned to the context in which the project was developed to the point that it makes no sense, for example the code contains dependencies on specific service providers like hosting companies or CDN's or expects unique hardware configurations.

Surely there is value in code that can't be run. If I write a nodejs app that only runs on Google app engine, it still might be useful to someone else.

I think you underestimate the difficulty of open sourcing some projects.

At the last company I worked at, we really wanted to open source some of the stuff we were doing, but we literally couldn't because we depended on some private APIs and were under NDA.

Acquihire in mid-2011 http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/bitly-acquires-twitterfeed...

Mario continued to work mostly independently on Twitterfeed for many years, maybe up until now.

Legend has it that one of the motivations for the acquisition was to help with a work visa situation for another employee from the UK, Mike Dewar. He was a graduate student in NYC who did an internship (or similar) at Bitly, but had to move back to the UK when he finished/discontinued his studies. So they had Twitterfeed hire him, then acquired Twitterfeed, then he was able to move back to the US office. Just hear-say from long ago, I don't recall any details :)

why would you make this kind of info public?

Legend has it that ploxiln from NYC that worked on Bitly is a disgruntled employee that had a problem with the company and/or the engineer he mentioned. Just hear-say from long ago, I don't recall any details :)

I don't see how what I said carries any negative connotations about anyone. Jeez.

Why would someone be discouraged from making this kind of info public?

Mentioning someone's name specifically feels off to me. It doesn't assist in explaining anything, just invades their privacy.

I was using this service back when many people were using RSS and Twitter was somewhat of a sane platform for interaction and information. It isn't as much as the lack of RSS use (I still use RSS) but more so of the lack of use of Twitter itself, which made me abandon this service. Twitter eventually became somewhat reasonable to follow via Lists. They don't want you to use RSS anyways, so ... we move on. Twitterfeed was a good and reasonable service.

Submit to Our Incredible Journey?

We lost the best free RSSfeeder on internet. Thank you guys for your services and good luck in your futures projects.

Hi, someone knows if it’s possible to export the rss list… some of my twitterfeed account are more than 100 items. so… tks a lot

did the Fifth Avenue address play any role in the winding down of this business

That address is bit.ly's corporate headquarters: https://bitly.com/pages/contact

This is sad, I use it

Time to move on to products that aren't tethered to a sinking ship.

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