Did iTunes Kill iPodderX?
Before we start, lets first start with a picture:
This shows sales over a 4 year period. The 3rd blip right at the end was iPodderX going away and was suppose to turn into Transistr.
When iTunes 4.9 was announced, August and I were right there for the announcement. Later we went on TWiT to talk about it, we did our best to stay positive, hiding our fear in talk about fish cheeks 
We already moved iPodderX from Podcatching client to into a standard RSS reader for feed reading and podcasting. But when we decided that, we put ourselves right into the mix with NetNewsWire and NewsFire which where very popular applications that did podcasting and RSS reading very well as well. It was easy for those applications to add good enough Podcasting support. From what I know, no one ended up using iPodderX to read news feeds.
As sales were dropping like a rock, day jobs were becoming demanding, and stress on august and I’s friendship also became very strained. We decided to stop working on it and move on to other things for a bit. August has been doing great work with his FoggyNoggin software creating very useful mac utilities, and I moved over to the web, now working full time with Mahalo.com!
I’d like to also note now the RSS application space on the desktop has changed drastically. NewsFire and NetNewsWire are now free, RSS is now in the browser (the browser itself and web apps like google reader and bloglines) and all handle RSS enclosures (what makes podcasting possible)
One last thing to leave on, iPodder (not releated to iPodderX) who is now known as Juice hasn’t been updated in eons and no other development has been made with any of the other podcatchers. We were not the only casuality.
If you have questions feel free to comment and I’ll be happy to answer them.
Check out what August has to say regarding all of this.
Update: Talked with Andrew Grumet who now works for PodShow and this downloads chart looks very similar to ours.
Tags: august trometer, dave winer, ipodder, ipodderx, juice, leo laporte, podcasting, transistr, twit
March 3rd, 2008 at 1:08 pm
[...] [Update: Here’s Ray’s take.] [...]
March 4th, 2008 at 6:50 am
I actually registered (the Windows version) after the iPodderX site was offline (but the forums, etc. were still going). I had been evaluating it and when my trial ran out I figured I’d try the register button, and it worked.
I only moved away from it two weeks ago, partly because I was sick of booting my Windows box just to download podcasts, and it refused to work on some feeds.
I can’t find anything that really does what I want. Is your pyPodder still available anywhere?
March 4th, 2008 at 7:30 am
I can probably do better, give me some time
March 5th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
[...] interesting chain of events. Both of the iPodderX guys posted their views of the situation, first Ray then August. I guess that put a bug in their ears because the next day, they released the [...]
March 6th, 2008 at 3:33 am
I don’t think it’s accurate to generalize and say, “no other development has been made with any of the other podcatchers.”. There is gPodder which is a python/pyGTK podcatcher, and judging by it’s changelog, it’s still under active development.
There are still a lot of podcast-listening people who don’t use iTunes.
March 6th, 2008 at 6:53 am
Richard Querin: sounds good, I haven’t heard of gPodder until now. I’ll have to check them out.