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title quote – Yogi Berra

I’ve been contemplating exactly what to write here, as I’m still grappling with the implications of the decision I’ve made. About 3 weeks ago, I informed Adam Green, the CEO of Grazr Corp., and the Board of Directors of my intent to resign from the company that I helped start and build over the past 3 years. While I’m still a partial owner, and will occasionally help out when needed, I will no longer be involved in the day-to-day operations of Grazr Corp. as their Chief Technology Officer.

Grazie the cow

This is not a decision I have taken lightly. Grazr has consumed a huge part of my life over the past three years. Like all startup stories, this involved many late nights, long hours, and numerous personal sacrifices. (A special thank you to all my family, friends and especially my awesome girlfriend Juliette for putting up with all my craziness.) In a strange way, I imagine founding a company is much like being a parent, which is probably why most people refer to it as their “baby.” In the end, I believe this is not only the best decision for me, but also the best decision for the company.

I’m not leaving Grazr because of the hard work, the sacrifices, or because of the struggle involved. Grazr, like all startups, continues to have its fair share of ups and downs. Sticking through both the good and bad times in a struggling company is one of the great virtues of startup founders. Like Paul Graham says, starting a company is like being punched in the face. Repeatedly. Sometimes for years on end. It’s the process of discovery and the passion for the vision that keeps the founder coming back for more.

So, you’re probably asking: “If that’s true, then why resign?” It’s a long complicated story. (Isn’t it always?) The short (or not so short) version, though, is that it was the convergence of a few things:

First, over the past three years, we built three products with really great (IMHO) technological underpinnings: Grazr.com, VibeMetrix, and AlertRank. However, for various reasons, with each progressive product my role in the overall design diminished. I decided to become an entrepreneur in large part due to my passion for designing and building products. I found that with a limited role in the design of our outward-facing projects, I felt a loss of some of the joy I once felt from being a part of the creative process.

Secondly, Grazr Corp. has made a shift to simpler, more targeted products that demand less of a technological focus. Grazr Corp.’s newer products are intentionally cleaner and simpler than the huge complex machine of interacting technology we built for Grazr.com. While we arguably substantially overdeveloped for Grazr.com, this shift also means that my particular skills are less relevant for the future direction of the company.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, over the three years Adam’s vision and my vision for the direction of the company began to significantly diverge. When determining the future of Grazr Corp, its products and future designs, we often disagreed but in the end followed Adam’s lead. This was absolutely the right thing to do, he is the CEO and ultimately responsible for the company, the employees, and answering to the investors. While supporting Adam in these decisions, it still, however, left me with the increasing feeling that I could no longer significantly affect the course of the company. With the daily mental and physical grind that comes with a startup like ours, the feeling of no longer being able to affect these kinds of decisions dampened my startup-passion and I began to burn out. When I realized I had arrived at that point, I knew that I was more of a liability to the company than an asset.

I’m still immensely thankful for the experience, and to have met and worked with Adam Green. Grazr Corp would never have been formed without him. Although our views on the products, method of development, and direction of the company differed, I learned an amazing amount from him over these past three years. He has continually impressed me with his ability to correctly predict technological trends. I remain grateful that he saw potential in me and the work that I was doing three years ago and helped me found this company. I remain confident that Adam will continue to look out for what is best for the company and its employees, ultimately making Grazr Corp a success.

So what now? Adam will continue to drive Grazr Corp. with AlertRank and other information products. The capabilities of Grazr.com will be substantially diminished, having its more advanced feed processing and manipulation technologies taken offline on June 25. This includes the feed merge engine, the embedded scripting engine GrazrScript, as well as the hosting accounts on Grazr.com. It will continue to serve the files already stored on Grazr.com, as well as provide the free Grazr widget, the advanced OPML and RSS widget that was the genesis of the company back in June 2006.

VibeMetrix was a hard-fought lesson for the company. After careful consideration, the site has been shut down. The idea of “blogger relationship management” was a good one, but in the time it took for us to try to explain the concept (and its workflow), the market for alerting and analytics tools exploded and became confusing, clogged and unfortunately for us, mostly filled with free tools. The lessons of VibeMetrix, however, led directly to Grazr Corp’s third product, AlertRank.

AlertRank is continuing to grow interest and customers, and is (as far as I know) the only tool expressly designed for managing alerting and information flow from Google. It will continue to be a major focus for the company going forward. Adam continues to provide tips and tricks for using Google Alerts in really interesting and powerful ways on his blog Mr Google Alerts. If you have even a passing interest in google’s search syntax, his posts are eminently worth reading.

I wanted to give a deep heart-felt thanks to the people that have made the past three years an amazing journey for me. I hope to continue to stay in touch and work with you in the future.

Thank you to all of Grazr.com’s earliest users, strongest evangelists and supporters:Fred Zelders @fzelders, Tony Hirst @psychemedia, Marjolein Hoekstra @cleverclogs, Marshall Kirkpatrick @marshallk, David Tebbutt @tebbo, Amy Bellinger @amyloo, Rick Shide @rickdog, Dan Weinstein @djweinstein, Tom Morris @tommorris, Chris Pirillo @chrispirillo, Kosso @kosso, and our many other supporters. Your belief in the technology and vision made a lot of what we did possible and worthwhile.

I also wanted to thank the exceptional team, both past and present, at Grazr Corp. that I had the pleasure of working with: Kurt Gray, Patrick Galbraith, Marc Pilon, Eric Whitten, Shannon Holmes and John Casey.

Lastly I wanted to thank Grazr Corp’s board, investors, and advisors for the support and advice over the years: Bruce Twickler, Louis Page, Dan Bricklin, Vadim Yasinovsky, Brian Aker, James Corbett (the original Grazer!), and David Weinberger.

For me, things are less clear, but a few things are definite. It has definitely been a truly amazing three years. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some great people and had a whirlwind course on the ins and outs of starting your own company.

I definitely love being an entrepreneur. While my heart right now is filled with a mix of emotions, ranging from nervousness, anxiety, excitement to a little bit of sadness, I couldn’t imagine having done or doing anything else. I’m unsure what the immediate future for me holds, but I certainly look forward to finding out.

photo by jurvetson

The new hotness online for the technoscenti and early adopter crowd is “Real Time”. The recent release of the new beta interface for FriendFeed has intensified the conversation regarding the consumption of information “as it happens”. Its most breathless proponents regard it as the evolution of news and the web as a whole.

The “Real Time Web” (RTW), at least in concept, is something of a hybrid between live broadcast technology (one to many) and the ability to custom tailor and blend a number of broadcast sources to get just the information that you want. As soon as new information is available in the channel, you can consume it immediately in real time.

When asked for examples, many people point to Twitter and FriendFeed as the poster children of the RTW. The ’subscription’ to individual’s status updates has led to a lot of interesting phenomena, such as Twitter breaking many major news stories much more rapidly than traditional news outlets.

But do they really represent the real time web? Clearly they are a form of near real time communication, but it is primarily updates of individuals only within a specific domain. Look closely at the frenetic flow of content that can appear on the new friendfeed beta and you’ll see that the “real time” portion is people messaging, sharing and conversing. The data that is presented in real time is FriendFeed’s user data, the data specifically controlled by FriendFeed itself (the same is true for Twitter).

I’m not trying to diminish the value in these real time communications, they have tremendous value in their own right. What’s exciting though, is that they also present a glimpse of what could be possible with rapid availability of information. In my opinion, what we are missing is the “web” part of the RTW. Twitter and FriendFeed are just the first step because they do not represent a true consolidation of online information in a real time channel.

Why make this distinction? Technologically, presenting information in real time to the user from within a controlled environment (within the walled gardens of a single site) is a significantly easier task than trying to move towards a real time presentation of the web as a whole. It is this latter concept of the RTW that interests me.

Already it seems that these two examples of real time are competing with each other on data availability. Twitter updates take a long time to appear in the friendfeed stream. This has been a loud complaint about FriendFeed, but it points to the problem of having real time cross site and application boundaries. It is not in Twitter or FriendFeed’s interests to make their data available in real time outside their sites.

The web is inherently distributed. This is one of its primary strengths. This has allowed the web to grow and scale in amazing and unpredictable ways. Synchronizing distributed systems is notoriously difficult though.

Although many have called for an open source, federated, version of Twitter, I think this lack of a true RTW is the primary stumbling block to its creation and deployment. Some federated synchronization mechanism needs to exist to allow islands of communication to update each other in near real time.

How do we get to the “Web” in “Real Time Web”?

I’ve only been partly thinking about this, so this post is partly to hear people’s research and ideas in this area. There are technologies that have been created that had similar objectives but that fell short for various reasons.

Ping networks, XMPP, update streams, FriendFeed’s SUP protocol, all try to improve update efficiencies but all seem to suffer from specific shortcomings. Whether it’s single points of failure, spam problems, or difficulty in implementation, there doesn’t seem to exist a real time updating silver bullet. I’d be interested to hear people’s experience with these technologies.

I’m puzzled by the clamoring for unrestricted Twitter API access. Not that people are upset, but that no one seems to ask ‘why?’ and immediately assumes they’re performing some kind of stupid, suicidal maneuver. Twitter enabled access to their underlying data with no guarantees and no prearranged relationship. I can’t help but feel that this is part of the climate of free entitlement that permeates our current startup business environment.

Twitter has yet to make any money.

Yes, yes, I know there are whispered, rumored, brilliant-as-the-sun, business plans, just waiting to be unleashed on the Twitter faithful. Until we see the plan and that plan starts to actually generate revenue, we’re left with a question of incentives.

Without a clear revenue stream, it’s damn near impossible to determine what’s behind this decision. There is a fundamental problem with the current state of Twitter tools and API usage, are the third party incentives aligned with Twitter’s? Before there was synergy because Twitter was doing all it could to grow, and unrestricted access enabled growth. Does it still make sense for Twitter to sacrifice everything for growth? Monetizing their offering, by it’s nature, is a diversion of resources from pure growth. I’d wager that there is increasing pressure to monetize what they have now. Growth without a business plan eventually just become a cost sink.

I hear the rebuttal, “But, but, twitter refuses to even charge money for unrestricted access!”, and you are you surprised by this? How much revenue do you think they could generate that way? What’s the cost in time and energy to support this new batch of elite-member third parties? A startup is all about using your energy wisely. Building a robust, scalable, meter-able, API infrastructure is obviously not what they’ve decided to focus on.

Twitter needs the third parties less than they need Twitter.

It sucks, even though Twitter would not be as successful today if it weren’t for the third party tools and applications, nothing is preventing them from turning them all off tomorrow. Twitter is a for profit enterprise that is holding all the power in these third party relationships. Any Twitter tool or third party application based on Twitter should have factored the risk that Twitter could pull the plug on the API at any moment into their venture. Twitter is under no obligation to provide access. If it’s not in their interest to do so, no amount complaining is going to change that.

The calls that say Twitter will die if they don’t allow unrestricted access to their API are, frankly, bullshit. The argument goes, all these advanced and cool Twitter tools will die without unrestricted access. People will get so annoyed they’ll move to another service.

Really? What people? What percentage of Twitter’s userbase even knows that these tools exist? Watch the public timeline for a while, how many of those people are Twitter power users? If these hypothetical power user people suddenly stopped using Twitter, do you think it’s going to make any significant dent in Twitter’s growth curve, a curve they’re currently in the exponential part of?

These predictions of doom are similar to what happened a few months back. Why didn’t the mass exodus occur when Twitter was essentially broken? The Twitter power users tried to stage a coup, with blog post after blog post proclaiming the death of Twitter. Why didn’t Twitter die when there were dozens of technically superior offerings that accomplished exactly the same thing and were actually usable when Twitter was consistently borked?

These power users may leave for a while in protest, but ultimately they will come back. Why? Because their audience will still be on Twitter.

Is it in Twitter’s best interest to allow others unfettered and unrestricted access to their data? Who knows. Twitter clearly doesn’t think so. Until we know what Twitter’s incentives are and how they plan to make money, we have no idea if this was a stupid or brilliant move. If the historical track record on predicting Twitter’s demise is any indicator, I think people will once again be surprised.

One things for certain, from a business perspective, they don’t owe anyone access.

I’ve become a big fan of FriendFeed lately. On that service I keep seeing the same exclamation come up again, and again, and again. People anxious over the unread count in their feed readers. Reading feeds becomes work, a chore, managing subscriptions and requiring active thought and scrubbing in the handling of news sources.

Some people say, suck it up, new media requires sweat, work, tears, gnashing of teeth to stay on top. Other people say don’t use a feed reader at all.

I think this is a highly limited and foolish way to approach things.

We are in a new world of news, syndication, and feeds. The feed reader was only one model of how one can consume these kinds of resources. Feed readers were built to approximate email clients since that was a known paradigm. This worked early on, but is now a fundamentally flawed way to read any reasonable quantity of news.

We’re stuck with some old ideas about read/unread that are very hard to shake.

Originally the read/unread count helped alert you that there was new content available for reading. in the new world there is always something new for you to read, accept it. You should decide when you want to read news, not have the reader tell you when you must read the news.

Originally read/unread was modeled on email, every item demanded action. New world, you do not have enough energy/time to engage with every item, get over it. This isn’t true for everyone, but I would argue for the vast majority of people it is. If you accept that you will not see every item, it frees you to consume a larger quantity of sources. It is in this variety of sources that often times more interesting relationships surface (different takes on the same underlying story for example).

Originally, blogs were single voices in the wilderness, miss one post and you may never hear the important ideas. In the new world there are a lot more bloggers and news concentrators every important idea is echoed, discussed, rehashed, and reblogged the chances of you missing a big idea, are frankly slim to none.

The solution? I think we’re still evolving our consumption models of news. The most effective current implementations are forms of the “River of News” idea first popularized by Dave Winer. There are several feed magazine / feed skimming sites that are, in one way or another, rivers of news.

This feels a bit like a personal crusade for me. I’m no stranger to feeds. We started Grazr to address *exactly* this problem over three years ago.

Much of our technology is based on feeds. Feeds are becoming an ever-increasing conduit of news and data but we think the subscription model or ‘unread inbox’ way of reading feeds is broken. It is our belief that people will increasingly want to experience information, not be slaves to it. This is where the name “grazr” comes from, grazing information, not drowning in it.

We failed to get much traction with our ideas back then, but I think the time is starting to become right for real feed consumers to look at not just their read/unread count, but *how* they engage with the news.

Grazr still has some problems (some pointed out with gusto by Robert Scoble some months back). Unfortunately with the current climate, and limited resources, we’ve shifted our development attention. Grazr is still there, but we’ve moved on to some other products, using our feed database, feed processing technology, and search technology.

In it’s current form, though, Grazr will allow you to upload your sub list (from say Google Reader) and create a single river of news from it. Again hat tip to Dave, but it really is a better way to consume the majority of content.

There are two really strong uses of the Grazr Reader IMHO. The first is to launch Grazr in the firefox sidebar and use it as a way to rapidly scan the latest headlines. Pop open, scan down, close… done. The second is that we have a slightly optimized version for the iphone. As a quick scan of the latest news with no read/unread guilt, I really haven’t found anything better. I bookmark a couple of topics on one of my home screens.

Even if you don’t use Grazr, consider using other tools for the consumption of news (especially in a river of news format). You might be surprised how much more news you’ll see, and how much more guilt free the whole process will be.

We’re in a new world.

I picked up a copy of 1Password a while back when it was on sale. I have to give a brief plug for it, it’s a very nice piece of software. You never realize how many passwords you’re managing in your head and how bad your passwords are until you have something like 1Password managing them.

Gadget geeks love spec sheets. When the iphone was first released, many gadgeteers sneered at the device, no GPS? Insanse! No video? Crippled! No removable battery? Scandalous! 2MP camera? What a piece of crap!

When I first got the iPhone, and being of a technological bent, friends and acquaintances would ask me about the iPhone’s ‘revolutionary innovations’. Surprising many, I would say that there was little technically new or innovative with the iPhone. There were devices with touchscreens, browsers, email, etc… long before the iPhone. Even interface gestures were a very old area of research.

What Apple did that was innovative was approaching the mobile device from a completely different perspective. Instead of a phone that happened to be able to do some computing-like tasks, they came at it from the approach of a pocket computer that also happened to make phone calls. This sounds like a trivial distinction but it makes a big difference.

The touchscreen is not a bullet on a spec sheet. The touchscreen is a an expression of this philosophical approach to the mobile experience. It allows you to ‘paint’ any interface you want onto the device and allows you to iterate that design over time. This is exactly analogous to the development of the GUI, software based buttons and interfaces allows much greater flexibility than anything hardware based.

I’ve seen some of the coverage by tech bloggers, including Scoble, about the Nokia N97 device and I hold to my position that this marks a failure for Nokia. To be fair, the specs and the design of the device are actually quite impressive. I think Nokia has done an excellent engineering job with this device. Looking at videos and its capabilities, it’s quite sexy. The problem is that it reflects the same philosophical approach to product development that the mobile industry has had for years. The touchscreen feels like a tick-mark on a spec sheet and not an embodiment of a different approach.

Both the blackberry storm, and this new Nokia seem to have this same problem. If they can somehow just bolt on a touchscreen onto their existing OS/device, they’ll not only have feature parity with an iPhone but exceed it on every count. Unfortunately, that’s not why the iPhone is great, a touchscreen does not an iPhone make.

Apple: Aluminum MacBook X-Ray Makes Perfect Desktop Background: “”

Technology in x-ray always looks cool to me.

(Via Gizmodo.)

I’ve been using our new product VibeMetrix to read materials on social media tools, and general philosophy of social media marketing. It’s interesting how many slight variations there are on the theme and what people think it means.

I while back I ran across this slideshow by a local Boston social media expert Marta Kagan that I thought was pretty informative and entertaining. Been meaning to share for a while but I’ve been busy writing code.

I know we’re used to thinking of it that way, but I think that image belies the nature of the company or what it’s rapidly evolving into. Google has created some pretty cool technology, have some of the best and brightest working away in the Googleplex, but are they a technology company?

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about Chrome, Google’s really interesting new browser, but why are they releasing a browser? I’ve been contemplating Google’s unique position in the tech space, and the fact that they make almost none of their money in that space.

If you take the perspective that they are not a technology company, why would they want to do this? If they’re not a technology company, then what? Google is in the business of advertising. Granted, their approach is very hight tech, but at it’s core, the vast majority of their revenue comes from ads.

Taking that view one possible motivation for creating their own browser comes into focus. What are the most popular browser plugins for Firefox? Ad blockers. If you control the browser, and you’re an advertising company, you can keep people from ignoring your ads.

I’m sure creating the “browser as OS” or possibly just improving the browser experience as a more stable platform for google apps, or possibly a development platform for Android were part of their reasoning for releasing Chrome, but at the moment they make almost no money from those types of efforts. The one thing I haven’t heard anyone talk about, and that I wouldn’t totally discount is the control of the ‘advertising channel’. I wouldn’t be surprised if Chrome either will intentionally lack a plugin architecture, or, at a minimum, will involve a vetting process that “for your safety” conveniently also disallows ad blockers.

It’s interesting to look at their actions in this way. Google is an advertising company and becoming more so each day.

The blog has been a sparse lately because we’ve been working, heads-down, on VibeMetrix. What is it? VibeMetrix, is a tool for engaging with social media. We hope it will evolve to become the best tool for engaging with bloggers, building relationships and filtering and tracking conversations on the internet.

I’ve had a series of posts I’ve wanted to write about the road that’s led us to this from our usual set of Grazr offerings. As usual, when working in a startup, inspiration comes from interesting and unlikely places.