Clammr

» see clammr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Parviz Parvizi and David Silverman met at Yale Law School and bonded, by their own account, over being the two slowest readers in the building. Parvizi had done time at McKinsey and at the FCC before this. The slow-reader story is the kind of founding anecdote that usually gets invented afterward, but in this case it points straight at the product: two people who got their information through their ears built a company for everyone else who does.

Clammr incorporated in 2014 and launched publicly on 8 December 2015. The product was one gesture. You opened an enabled audio file, dragged a selection window across the waveform until it sat on the good part, trimmed it to 24 seconds or less, and posted it. The clip played inline wherever you put it and linked back to the full episode. Podcasters could install a WordPress plugin through Blubrry's PowerPress so the clip button sat right on their own player, and Parvizi's pitch to them was blunt: "Hey Clammr me."

About a million dollars of angel money went in. The company called it the Instagram of audio in interviews, which tells you the ambition and also the problem, because Instagram had a thing Clammr could never have.

~ the chronicle ~

~ twenty-four seconds, and what audio cannot do ~

The number was not arbitrary. Clammr was built for the moment when a podcast says something worth repeating and you want to show one person, immediately, without asking them to download an app and scrub to 41:15. Twenty-four seconds is long enough for a joke or a claim and short enough that nobody feels trapped. "We wanted to make it incredibly, brainlessly easy," Parvizi said at launch.

It was aimed at a genuine gap. Podcasting in 2015 had no unit smaller than the episode, so there was no way to quote one and no way to link to a moment in a way that played. The whole discovery problem of the medium came down to asking strangers to commit forty minutes on faith.

Here is the thing Instagram had. A photograph announces itself in a feed with no effort at all from the viewer, finished and legible before you decided to look at it. An audio clip is a gray rectangle with a triangle on it. Somebody has to choose to press the triangle, and in a scrolling timeline that is an enormous ask, which is why video with burnt-in captions took this territory a year later while sounding like nothing at all.

Clammr understood the problem it was solving and could not get past the one it was not. The clipping tool worked exactly as advertised. The surface people were pasting the clips onto was indifferent to sound.

~ the last email ~

The notice went out in the last week of June 2017. "We will be shutting down the Clammr service at 11:59pm ET on 2 July 2017," it said, with a pointer to the user guide for anyone who wanted to save their clips first, and a closing line thanking people "for all of the creativity and joy that you have shared with the world using Clammr." Parvizi told the trade press he felt fortunate to have been in a position to take a swing at something like it.

That stretch, late 2015 into 2017, is when American podcasting turned into an industry with money and a discovery crisis. None of that reached Turkey on any schedule I would recognize. Turkish podcasting arrived properly around 2018, by which point the format question had been settled elsewhere by Instagram Stories and a caption file. Clammr died in the window where the answer still looked open.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »