Grazr

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

~ the eulogy ~

I was finishing university when Grazr existed and I read feeds like everybody else did, through a reader with a subscription list I never pruned. Grazr was aimed one layer above that, at the people who wanted to publish their subscription list rather than keep it, and I was never in that group.

The product was a small embeddable box. You gave it an OPML file, which is an outline format that most people encountered exactly once, as the thing your feed reader exported when you wanted to move somewhere else. Grazr rendered that outline as a browsable widget you could drop into a blog post, so a reader could click through a whole bundle of feeds without leaving the page or subscribing to anything.

Michael Kowalchik ran it out of Boston, with Adam Green alongside him. Green had been CTO at Andover.net, the company that owned Slashdot, and had taken it through an IPO, so this was not two people who had wandered into the web by accident. Version 1.0 landed on 18 September 2006 with a viral "get your own copy" button and a sharing feature that generated the embed snippet for whatever blogging platform you were on.

Underneath the widget there was more ambition than the widget showed. Kowalchik later described a full scripting environment running JavaScript in the cloud, built before anyone was selling that phrase, which is a fair summary of the company's whole problem.

~ the dossier ~

~ what opml was supposed to be ~

The bet was that RSS is the de facto API to the web, and that if feeds were the data layer then OPML was the container that made collections of them portable. Under that reading, a reading list becomes an object you can hand to someone, embed, remix and republish, and attention itself becomes something shareable instead of private.

It was a good bet that lost. Feeds did become infrastructure, but the part that mattered turned out to be one company's reader rather than an open container format, and when Google Reader arrived the social layer got absorbed into it. Nobody needed a widget to share a bundle when the reader did sharing natively.

~ the funny part ~

Kowalchik posted the widget's obituary on 28 July 2010 and gave the plainest reason in the genre. The company could no longer justify the expense of keeping it running, and even with cheap servers and hosting it still costs something to keep a service fast and reliable. The widget had not been the focus of the company for a long time by then. Grazr Corporation officially shut down on 30 September 2010, three years before Google Reader took the rest of the category down with it.

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