Note: I have not been a part of day-to-day operations at Grazr.corp for over a year now and am not speaking for the company in any way.
Even though I’m no longer with the company, I’ve been asked by several people now what’s happening with Grazr. Sadly, Grazr.com is currently in the process of shutting down. Grazr the company has no official blog anymore so I’ve decided to write about the news. The truth is Grazr and the Grazr Widget have not been a focus of the company for a long time and it appears that the company can no longer justify the expense of keeping it running. Even with the low costs of servers and hosting these days, it still costs something to keep the service up, fast, and reliable.
Now, as the original author of the Grazr widget, to say this makes me sad is an understatement. I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a new service + widget, one that performs many of the same functions of the original Grazr widget, but I decided for various reasons it wasn’t right for me to do it. Now that the company has officially decided to shut down Grazr and the widget, it’s gotten me thinking about putting something together again, primarily as a side hobby.
I’m writing this post partially to gauge interest in such a project. Even as a side hobby, I’d need to explore how this new RSS/OPML service could be made sustainable, some kind of a pay component. I’m not sure exactly what that would be, but at a minimum it would need to cover the cost of the servers. Realistically I can’t afford to run this new project out of pocket so I would need some kind of support to make it happen. I’m interested in ideas as well as what premium services people would be interested in.
I know a common response will likely be “advertising”, but advertising is a trickier business model than most people realize. Even if I were to pursue an advertising model, starting this new service from scratch I can’t afford to pay the initial ramp up period before that kind of business model could potentially become sustainable.
More than likely, this will mark the end of the “super” RSS/OPML widget. I don’t think anyone has really tapped into the deep potential in the combination of OPML and RSS. The nature of this kind of service requires a large free base, and I’m not convinced people feel they get enough value from it that they’d be willing to support / pay. It’s sad, but it may just be time for me to keep moving forward with my other projects and wish Grazr.com and the widget a fond farewell.
{ 20 comments }
Sad. I used to use it but gave up as it was not sure why I should, given that Google Reader has been a better experience.
Sad. I used to use it but gave up as it was not sure why I should, given that Google Reader has been a better experience.
Grazr always had an existential dilemma, what was it trying to be. It wasn't intended to be a general purpose RSS reader, but then, it never quite figured out what it *did* want to be. I personally dislike Google Reader, but I think I'm in an odd minority there.
I think there are a lot of people waiting for better RSS reader experience. I personally am looking for web version which provides deep filtering, plus sifting and sorting on demand. I am not afraid of data, but give me tools to sift, sort and filter. There's also a potential gap from the data generated by comments (comments like these). No one has been able to extract the value out of short or long conversations on the internet. People hold conversations at one place or another, but no one aggregates.
Grazr supposedly had a potential to aggregate, plus, it was lightening fast, something new at the time (sort of like Google when Yahoo search was the only option).
It was interesting how few people appreciated the speed at the time, I'm glad someone noticed.
I agree there's room for a better RSS experience, although I would generalize it to a better news and information experience. I wrote about some of my thoughts on the consumption of feeds and news sources here: http://mikepk.com/2009/01/rss-bankrupt-were-in-... but I have ideas that go beyond that post.
Google has given us a lot of great things, but the double edged sword is that they've sucked out most of the oxygen for potential innovation in this space. It's tough to compete with their resources and “can you believe you get all of this for free?”.
Oh, and I agree, comments are a tough problem no one has been able to really figure out. Backtype kind of tried to aggregate comments but it didn't quite gel with me.
Doh… That was a great widget… Now I have to change my site,…. DOH…
Hi Mike,
Shame to see the widget go, though I have to admit I have largely stopped using it (though when I did it drove my thinking considerably… happy days…)
I would have loved to explore ideas around using Grazr to represent different views of Wordpress feeds on writetoreply.org/jiscpress.org, but haven't really trusted the Grazr widget for the last however many months.
I loved the idea of Grazrscript too, which keeps coming to mind whenever I'm trying to cobble something together for my iPodTouch/Android phone – the Grazr widget would have been such a convenient scripting envt for feed powered online apps; and if it also had offline facilities, could be a great feed powered app prototyping tool?
But then, I always have been a feed junky!
Hi Mike,
Shame to see the widget go, though I have to admit I have largely stopped using it (though when I did it drove my thinking considerably… happy days…)
I would have loved to explore ideas around using Grazr to represent different views of Wordpress feeds on writetoreply.org/jiscpress.org, but haven't really trusted the Grazr widget for the last however many months.
I loved the idea of Grazrscript too, which keeps coming to mind whenever I'm trying to cobble something together for my iPodTouch/Android phone – the Grazr widget would have been such a convenient scripting envt for feed powered online apps; and if it also had offline facilities, could be a great feed powered app prototyping tool?
But then, I always have been a feed junky!
I love the Grazr widget. I would be willing to pay like $50/year for it. Its really the only way i know to serve up the news from 6 different RSS feeds on my site- I am really struggling to find a replacement now without it- I hope you have enough response to put out an unbranded pay per use widget…please let me know derrickhand300 (at) yahoo(dot) com
Tony, I think you were one of the few who really saw the power and potential in Grazr. We always got stuck trying to explain all the additional power when 99.99% of people just wanted a dynamic blogroll.
GrazrScript in particular makes me sad since so few people even knew it existed and just as the language was getting *really* interesting, internal company realities led to us abandoning it. I still maintain that feeds are essentially the de facto API for much of the web's data and a hosted powerful 'glue' programming/scripting environment that can manipulate that data (not just a toy like PIpes) would be amazing. Of course who would pay for such a thing?
I let you know, derrick, if I put something together. So far the response has been a bit muted but I still have some interest in bundled information flows.
Yahoo pipes still lacks a front end environment… I've done a lot of Pipes based workshops over the last couple for years, and grazr would have been the ideal front end UI for it (simple embeddability is a real issue for many of the users I've run workshops for, folk who aren't developers and don't necessarily get code at all…).
The javascript libraries have also moved on now (eg jquery, YUI, browser storage), plus increasing support for PuSH means that real time updates are more widely supported… SO if you ever did start working on a new version of the widget, I'd certainly be keen to give a it whirl. particulalry in context of:
- pipes front end;
- good enough feed powered mobile app UI
I feel like the problem with Pipes (and what I've heard from people who use it) is that it makes the easy stuff, easy, but makes the moderate or hard stuff damn near impossible. I think visual programming languages are just too fundamentally limited to do anything of substance with. That's just my humble opinion though.
That's as maybe… but I see pipes as a tool for people who can't code, don't have access to a server, don't have access to a developer.
I'm interested in lowering barriers to entry to programming for people who don't write code but do work with information. Plug'n'play configuration of existing services, not having to write glue code in assembler…
I think visual programming can be a terrific tool to help introduce people to programming concepts, but I've always bristled at the concept of “programming for non-programmers!”. I feel like the phrase is a bit of an oxymoron. If you're programming, be it via visual drag and drop blocks or lines of code, you are a programmer. I agree, though, requiring a development environment and a server of some sort is still a huge barrier. I also think that if there was some way for people to “graduate” from introductory visual programming to more powerful tools (code, or a mixture of visual blocks and code), that would satisfy a lot of the frustrations I've heard voiced by people using Pipes.
I'm not talking about programming for non-programmers; i'm talking about programming for non-coders and non-developers. I think everyone should be able to programme… but i don't see why they should have to write code.
eg primary reason i haven't used umpteen things I really want to use is because i don't have eclipse installed; and whilst i can generally eg reuse bits of code by cut and paste even if i donlt understand how it works, i still have no idea at all how to get anything out of svn…
I have a real stumbling block with syntax in code, and have wasted more hours than i care to remember debugging things that were messed up because of syntax errors (yeah right, should learn how to use a debugger…)…
Sorry, I'm touchy about the “programming for non programmers” thing, didn't mean to paint you with that brush
. I still think that if you want to do anyting above a trivial program or simple example , you really need to learn to code. That's just my opinion, but I think the history of visual programming environments has mostly borne that out.
I've looked at moderately complex behaviors in Pipes, and frankly the “program” is usually very scary and full of crazy hacks. I look at it and think, “That should be 5 lines of code, instead it's 6 pages of crazy wires and feedback loops strewn all over this canvas”. I think many people are intimidated by code and that it could be made a lot friendlier (and easier to play with without repercussions).
One of the objectives with GrazrScript was to make it completely hosted, without the need for an IDE or installed tools. Millions of people dabbled with javascript because there was an existing runtime environment (the browser) that they didn't really have to monkey with. I wanted to bring the same kind of experimentation and code sharing to the feed and information “flow” space. Never quite got there.
I agree and donlt with the non-trivial stuff… I can do v powerful things by leveraging different systems together in something like yahoo pipes, and then outputting results to another plug'n'play app that would be more than a few minutes work in code no matter how well I'd set up my dev environment.
But then, sometimes code is the tool you need for particular applications. But that's not the space I'm trying to promote engagement in. (That said, things like pipes can often be used to construct working specifications or rapid prototypes of apps that folk think they might want…)
As to Grazrscript and the hosted code/dev envt basis for feed'n'flow data – I'm with you all the way on that
It's a pity and a shame that Grazr stopped.
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