Service shutdown

Dear users,

This is the last post in our blog. We announce the termination of Queryfeed. It
has been a long ten years of its work, and I hope Queryfeed has helped in your
business. But for each service, sooner or later it’s time to shut it down rather
than support, and Queryfeed is not an exception.

The thing is, although the service has a paid subscription, I have never
considered it as a business. Nor was it profitable as well. I always treated it
as a toy or a platform for some experiments. Initially, I started it as a Python
script which fetched data from Twitter. In time, I hosted it on Google App
Engine, then, after it has constantly been breaking quota limits, migrated to
dedicated hosting.

In time, I switched from Python to Clojure and remade Queryfeed from scratch. It
has become faster, and I reduced my payments for hosting. Apparently, I added
Instagram support, and the traffic grew up dramatically. For some years, I’ve
been constantly fighting with Twitter and Instagram trying to break their
defence against parsing. I’ve tried raw HTML parsing, TOR network, grey proxies,
and lots of other stuff. I even bought proxies being installed on ordinary
users’ computers as malware.

I’m even sure that the way both Twitter and Instagram work nowadays was affected
by Queryfeed. The traffic was huge, and any bots, scripts, RSS readers were
reaching it all the time. It was exciting to watch the number of requests grow:
I felt like I’m an owner of something meaningful. But today, I’m completely
indifferent to the project. I don’t like to parse social networks anymore, nor
support a service which does it.

Parsing social networks is a duty, which, when you’re doing it, you’re always
one step behind. In fact, you steal information, so you don’t bring anything new
to the world. If one day Twitter stops, a parsing service will become
useless. What you do is the secondary stuff, even if it’s popular among some
people.

Now, close to the subject.

The service will be available for about a week or so; then I’ll turn off the
servers. I cannot propose another service, so you’re welcome to find it by
yourselves. All the Paypal subscriptions will be cancelled by me manually so
that you won’t be charged in vain. I won’t share any user data that I’ve
collected in the database.

You can reach me on my personal web-page or emailing me at
ivan@grishaev.me. I wish you all the best, have a good Christmas and the
New Year. Thanks a lot for staying with Queryfeed, it was great!

Ivan Grishaev

Source: ゲーマーズオンラインショップ
Service shutdown