Flowgram

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

~ the obit ~

Flowgram launched in July 2008 with a pitch that was awkward to write down and obvious the moment you watched one. You recorded yourself talking while you moved through web pages, and what played back was not a video of a browser. It was the pages themselves, loading live, scrolling where you had scrolled, with your voice over the top. Links still worked. Embedded video still played. You could stop the narration halfway and go wandering off into the page the narrator had been pointing at.

The man behind it had done this before at a different scale. Abhay Parekh co-founded FastForward Networks, which Inktomi bought for $1.3 billion in 2000, and he had since spent time as a venture partner at Accel. Flowgram raised $1.3 million, a figure that reads like a rounding error against the FastForward number.

Eleven months after launch it was finished. Parekh sent the shutdown letter on 12 June 2009 and TechCrunch printed it in full the same day. The service stayed up to the end of the month and went dark on 30 June 2009.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the investor list ~

The names on the cap table are the reason this one gets remembered at all: Reid Hoffman, Josh Kopelman, Caterina Fake, Stewart Butterfield, Bud Colligan, Kevin Lynch, Joi Ito and Rajeev Motwani. LinkedIn's founder, First Round's founder, both of the people who built Flickr, Adobe's chief technology officer, and a Stanford computer scientist whose PageRank paper is the reason Google exists. A tool with that much belief behind it still only ran for eleven months, which is not long enough for a free English-language web product to reach anybody outside the circle that funded it. Flowgram never showed up in Turkey in any form that reached me, and the category it belonged to arrived later and from the other direction, as screen recorders that wrote a file to disk.

~ thirty days to save your work ~

The letter is unusually plain about why. Parekh wrote that the service had received excellent reviews and an enthusiastic core user base, and then that they were not able to demonstrate, especially in those economic times, that Flowgrams would ever be prevalent enough to monetize through either advertising or subscriptions. He signed it "Abhay Parekh (Founder) and the rest of the Flowgram Team".

Then came the part every one of these letters has. Your Flowgrams would stop playing at the end of the month, so you were to click share, scroll down to the export-to-video section, and download the result before the deadline. The export button turned the one thing Flowgram had invented, a recording made of living pages, into an ordinary video file. Saving your work meant agreeing to lose the feature you had come for.

~ the domain now belongs to someone else ~

flowgram.com answers today with a no-code app builder run by a company that has nothing to do with any of this. The old source went the other way: Parekh's engineer put the whole codebase on GitHub under the name flowgram.com, with a description that dates the company 2007 to 2009 and calls it a browser-based player that acted like an interactive screencast.

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