What Zhuaxia was
Zhuaxia (抓虾) was a Chinese-language online RSS reader that launched in 2006 and shut down on August 20, 2015. It was a popular subscription tool among blog readers in the Chinese internet and one of the landmark sites of China’s Web 2.0 era. RSS is a content-subscription standard that lets readers aggregate updates from blogs and news sites; Zhuaxia was a representative Chinese RSS reading service of that era (Chinese Wikipedia: 抓虾).
History
According to Chinese Wikipedia: on May 25, 2010, founder Xu Yirong confirmed that Zhuaxia had been acquired by Douban in the first half of 2009; on August 5, 2015, users received an email from Zhuaxia announcing that the service would close on August 20, 2015, and asking them to back up their data; on August 20, 2015, the service was terminated. Zhuaxia has no official website or working online entry point.
Discussion in the show
In Weekly #005’s chapter “RSS、独立博客与内容开放” (“RSS, independent blogs, and open content”), while discussing the openness of the Chinese internet, Xiangyang Qiaomu said: “RSS existed back in Web 1.0 and 2.0 — sites like Zhuaxia were all building RSS readers — but in the end the big platforms carved everything up and locked content inside their own systems”. In the same chapter, Yang Pan noted that while curating AI information sources he found US AI media universally provide RSS, while Chinese vendors’ official releases generally do not. This is participant recollection and commentary on the rise and fall of the RSS era. See the chapter in Weekly #005 (Chinese transcript).
Frequently asked questions
What was Zhuaxia?
Zhuaxia was a Chinese online RSS reader launched in 2006 that aggregated updates from blogs and news sites; it was one of the landmark sites of China’s Web 2.0 era. Note the disambiguation: “抓虾” in Chinese also literally means “catching shrimp.”
Does Zhuaxia still work?
No. Zhuaxia terminated its service on August 20, 2015; the closure notice was emailed to users on August 5 that year, asking them to back up their data.
Who owned Zhuaxia later on?
According to Chinese Wikipedia, founder Xu Yirong confirmed in 2010 that Zhuaxia had been acquired by Douban in the first half of 2009.