Findory Closing Down

January 15, 2007

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Greg Linden delivered some news that just brings my whole day down: Findory, the greatest personalized news site the internet has ever seen, is closing down.

Greg , the man who built Findory after an incredible run at Amazon, announced that development will slow, and Findory will last through most of the year, but eventually it will fade away.

Here’s the comment I left on his blog:

Wow, I am so sorry to see Findory go. It has easily been one of my favorite online tools since the day I discovered it, and I have no idea how I am going to live without it.

Thank you so much, Greg, for all the hard work you have put into Findory. You may consider yourself lucky to have worked on Findory, but I consider myself lucky to have used it. Findoy has taught me what we need to demand of personalized systems, and any company that enters this space will have no choice but to follow the rules you established, or fail by not learning.

I hope you consider ways for Findory to live on, maybe by giving back part of the codebase to the community, or letting the users fund the website’s basic upkeep. If you can’t, let me be one of many to say that I consider it a priviledge to have gained from Findory in many ways.

I’m not sure how I’ll get on without Findory. Findory was how I discovered new blogs and found great stories from blogs no one had ever heard of. Findory was a news junkie’s greatest gift, a site that let you read your news, and then learned how to bring you better news as you did so. I’ve read 2,617 articles through Findory. I have three Findory RSS feeds that give me hundreds of new things to read every day. It was a part of how I conducted my day, every day, for two years.

I’m hoping that the hard work Greg did on Findory does not dissapear, just because Greg is moving on. I’m sure there are many possibilities for the website. If I were at Microsoft, and had some purchasing authority, I would buy it in an instant, build it into Live.com, and watch as Microsoft wins awards for the great work started at Findory. Otherwise, I think the personalization code, put into the hands of the open source community, could revolutionize hundreds of sites across the internet, built into smarter web applications. Hell, I’d pay a fee to keep Findory up and running, and I’m sure other users would too, so even that’s a possibility.

Whatever happens in the future, I guarantee Greg has left his mark on the web, first at Amazon, then entirely through his own great ideas at Findory. He should be proud of the work he has done.

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