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The Old Reader RSS app closes registration after months of 'hell'

The Old Reader RSS app closes registration after months of 'hell'

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The Old Reader founders
The Old Reader founders

Google Reader is long gone and while a handful of new alternatives have popped up over the last few months, one popular option is essentially closing up shop: The Old Reader. In a blog post, the team behind the RSS reading web app said that they are giving up development on the product because they're simply exhausted from building the product. As of Monday, the web app is no longer accepting new users. And in two weeks, The Old Reader will turn into a private site for those who've registered before March 13th. If you're an Old Reader user who signed up after March 13th, the time to pull your data and move over to another product is now — user data is available for export in OPML files.

"We have had no work life balance."

The Old Reader launched about a year ago after founders Anton Tolchanov, Elena Bulygina and Dmitry Krasnoukhov were unhappy with changes Google made to social and sharing features in Google Reader, according to The Washington Post. The Old Reader caught on and at one point had as many as 60,000 users sign up in a single day, the Ukrainian team said on its Facebook page. Currently, the app has about 420,000 users, the team said. Things were going well until March, when Google announced that it was going to kill Google Reader. Since then, the trio has gone from a normal life to one they described as "hell in every possible aspect we could imagine." Over the last five months "we have had no work life balance at all," the developers wrote. Such a sleep-deprived lifestyle just isn't sustainable "if you're running a project for hundreds of thousands of people," they said.