Scoble Feedback

I wasn't expecting this kind of a response from Robert Scoble to my comments on Mathew Ingram's Blog regarding Twitter and their architectural issues. I really honestly appreciate the feedback on Grazr, even if it's painful for me to hear as one if it's creators.

First, I want to say, Grazr is still here. We have lots of users, just not as many as we'd like and not on the growth curve we'd been hoping for. We've been trying to evolve and iterate our service to find the elements of it that are compelling, what it "wants" to be. One of the truths of startups is that you rarely "hit it big" with your initial idea. Twitter had no idea what they were onto when they first launched the service. Flickr started as an online game for girls and it took them time to find their niche. The key is accepting feedback and looking for the aspects of your technology that people find interesting and moving emphasis. We are still very much in this process.

Robert, thanks for the feedback. What you've pointed out is pretty much an exact list of the issues we've identified as we'd planned for our next version of Grazr, one we intend to launch in a few months. The strength of our core team is the technology skill-base, which in a lot of ways gives us the opposite problem as Twitter. Our architecture, services and scaling are extremely solid, but at the same time we've brought in some new people to help us redesign, re-articulate and relaunch the service in ways we're confident are going to be much more consumer-facing and understandable.

I'll be very interested in your thoughts on the new version. I'll let you know when we're ready, I would love to get more (albeit brutal) honest feedback :)

(I cross posted this to our company blog Feedonomics as well)