The Death of Ego for iOS

Ego, an app forever loved by bloggers, seems like it's on its last legs. The app would show you a neat list of widgets with all your various stats from around the web. RSS subscribers, pageviews from Squarespace or Google Analytics, Twitter followers, Tumblr info, and more.

The problem is that the app relied heavily on the APIs of these services. APIs that have since been deprecated. Per the latest update to Ego:

Sadly, some widget types have been removed from Ego:

Ember: The service was shut down a while back. The ability to add Ember widgets has been removed.

Feedburner: The Feedburner API is being shut down in October, so unfortunately Feedburner widgets will cease to function after then. The ability to add Feedburner widgets has been removed.

Squarespace: Squarespace recently launched Version 6 of their platform and it's a real stunner, but they've removed support for Ego from their stats API. The ability to add Squarespace widgets has been removed.

Tumblr: Unfortunately, Tumblr has recently completely changed their API and removed the feature Ego was using to fetch followers statistics. The ability to add Tumblr widgets has been removed.

All the app now supports is a measly list of four services:

… Analytics, Mint 2, Twitter and Vimeo.

The developer — Garret Murray, the creator of the new and excellent Scratch app — promises to continue to develop the app revealing that a new design is in the works and that there are still plans for Ego. Indeed, the latest version does bring iPhone 5 and iOS 6 support. I'm still keeping it around on my phone just to see what they do with it.

There doesn't seem like there is much left for Ego to do though. Perhaps certain APIs will return — Squarespace being a likely candidate to do that at some point — but even still Ego might not be very useful to people. It used to be tremendously useful. Now it's not.

What a shame.