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