As a Feed140 user, you may be wondering how long it will take to fix the latest of the issues we are experiencing including non-functioning RSS Feeds, stopped queues, and nagging performance problems.
I cannot honestly tell you how long it will take but I can tell what we are doing about it. And, I can also guarantee that we will not stop until we have delivered a reliable, fully-functional application to you.
Since our new development team took over they have spent the majority of their time — hundreds and hundreds of hours — trying to build Feed140 into the application that we all want. In that respect, we have completely failed. The application simply does not reliably do what it is supposed to do.
I don’t blame the team — these are top notch programmers who know what they are doing and have worked extremely hard and creatively to resolve issue after issue.
It took us eight months of trying to realize it, but the problems of Feed140 run deep into it’s foundation — the database design, basic functions, even the core programming language are all sub-par at best.
The problem isn’t so much functional as it is performance related. In other words, we can make the application do what we want it to do, but we can’t support a large number of users with what we have without major peformance problems.
The majority of our resources go in to customer support, chasing bugs, and replacing chunks of code here and there. Not only has it been much more difficult than it should be to add features and improve the application, but it has also proven to be difficult to make those features work reliably once added.
Given all this, we have decided to shut down the current Feed140 application and start over from scratch. We have already started the project to build the next version of Feed140 from the ground up. This time we will build it with the full knowledge of what works and what doesn’t from the original application and build it for salability and performance.
When the new application is available, we will re-launch a new beta phase and the first thing we will do is invite our current beta users (you) to try again with the new version.
We will not import any accounts from the current application into the new one — it will be a complete fresh start.
If you are a premium subscriber — your payments will be canceled and you will receive a refund within the next week via PayPal.
The application will remain open for the next week so that you can download your play lists, copy RSS feeds or whatever else you wish to do with your account, but we will remove the connection to your Twitter account and we will stop all functions.
I wish we could have delivered on our promise to you with this version of Feed140, but I am also excited to know that the application we all want is well on it’s way because we now have an experienced, seasoned team that understands the issues very well.
I can’t say how long it will be until we are ready to re-launch with the new version, but we will make sure you know about it. Thanks for being a beta user of Feed140 and I hope you will consider doing so again.
Doug Hudiburg
Founder, Feed140