Jeremy kicked Sunday morning off by polishing his crystal ball and predicting Feedster’s demise by year end 2006:

Is it just me, or has Feedster been completely useless for over 6 months now? I have no idea if it’s related to the recent departure of Scott Rafer (former CEO) and Scott Johnson (former co-founder), but I’m amazed at how bad it is. And I should know. I’ve been a Feedster user from the first day it was announced, back when it was called “Roogle.”

His prediction post garnered responses from the now Feedster CEO/President, Chris Redlitz, former CEO Scott Rafer and co-founder Scott Johnson (or somebody claiming to be Mr. Johnson).

Redlitz professional comments seek to explain the vision for Feedster including hints at where they might be going. Before Redlitz comment, Johnson’s response was that Jeremy’s prediction “made [Johnson’s] day.” I also noticed this commenter played the Prince card using a “Formerly of Feedster” in his name. Interesting exchange if this was the real Scott Johnson.

I wonder if Johnson used Feedster to be notified of the Zawodny’s prediction post? Wouldn’t that be ironic? Finally, this commenter leaves the words: “take care and keep watching I’ve got something interesting brewing.”

Again, if this is the real Johnson and not some imposter, that comment just sits wrong with me. It sort of reminds me of what happened here not too terribly long ago with Pubsub when I was posting about Feedster and a Pubsub employee stopped by to tell me to ask me to check out something new from them. And when I did and found the stats to be broken and unreliable — and wrote saying just that — Pubsub’s CEO chose to snub me and label it as abuse.
I noticed Kevin Burton was in the comments too and found a way to slip in a mention for his service, complete with smiley: “Oh. And did I know that TailRank has really killer full-text search? :)”

Mr. Rafer’s commentary that followed Redlitz was more professional than the would-be Johnson:

A lot has been accomplished at Feedster since I left, all of it in support of making Feedster an ever-larger and profitable business. That’s the mission I took up when I joined in Sept ‘03. It’s also why we three (ScottJ, Francois, and me) signed up Chris in May ‘04.

I’m not sure what fell apart personnel wise with Feedster former officers and current management or what their long term vision is about but I do know one thing: Feedster, just like Pubsub, definitely could use some work cleaning up the crap. Conversely, and of course I’m terribly biased because I was a part of it, but I liked their whole countdown to the Feed of the Year program they did at the end of 2005. That seemed like they were honestly trying to find and promote some blogs that might not get as much recognition as all the familiar players.

Seriously, I hear Jeremy on the technical issues and it seems by Mr. Redlitz comments that they are working on that(?). How many times has Dave Sifry of hit blogs critical of Technorati saying: “we’re working on it” and indeed, things did improve on their service. Therefore, I’m going to cut Feedster some slack and hope they quickly and decisively clean up the issues that Jeremy and some commenters mentioned.

As for the personnel changes? Really, this is none of our business (the blogosphere in general) who works at Feedster, how skilled they are, yadda, yadda. Frankly, I don’t really care who is working for Feedster as long as they are working to keep the service reliable and useful. So hopefully, blogosphere drama stuff aside, I hope that’s where the bulk of resources — time and money — are focused at Feedster in 2006.

Update 10:07am PST: Zawodny continues his pessimism today, posting that Slashdot is going out of style in 2006.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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