Feedonomics

The final phase of the 3.0 beta period began yesterday with the release of paid accounts. These accounts make Grazr much more powerful:

You can create an unlimited number of streams that merge and filter multiple feeds. Each stream can be viewed in our widget or used as a normal feed in any other feed tool, such as Google Reader. The feed for a stream can be viewed an unlimited number of times in our widgets or any other tool.

Streams can contain many more feeds. Free accounts are limited to 50 feeds, but paid accounts can merge and filter hundreds of feeds, and the highest level account has no limit on the number of feeds you can merge into a single stream.

Streams in free accounts only return 50 items, but paid accounts can display up to 300 items as the result of merging and filtering feeds.

Paid accounts add historical storage of feeds. Feeds normally contain a limited number of items, usually about 15 to 20. Paid accounts store all the items from a feed in our database, and make them available for merging and filtering. The highest level account has unlimited historical storage, so you can go back and find an item by date, keyword and media type long after it is no longer available in the physical feed.

Private Grazr files have been requested by lots of users, and paid accounts now deliver them. There are several levels of privacy available to all paid accounts. You can hide files from everyone else while you work on them. You can password protect individual files, so only people you give the reading password can view them. You can also add a reading password to an entire account, so only people who know that password can view any files. Once a password is applied to any Grazr reading list, it protects any widget created from that file. This means that you can post a widget on a public web page that only displays its contents to someone who enters the password.

Paid accounts have a 30-day free trial period, so you can try out these new features with no risk. If you cancel your paid account within 30 days, you will not be charged anything. We have lots of additional paid features under development that will be added over the coming months, including printing to PDF files, widget usage statistics, and an API that lets you create reading lists, widgets and streams from any programming language. When these features are added, they will be available in existing paid accounts for no extra charge.

We are still providing all of our older Grazr.com features free of charge. You can create an unlimited number of readings lists, host them on our site, and create an unlimited number of widgets for your own Web pages for no charge. We intend to keep all free features exactly the same as they have always been.

Over the past two years we have steadily added more features to the Grazr.com collection of tools. We thought we were making it increasingly useful, but we kept finding out that the more features we added, the more confused people became. So we have finally learned our lesson. Grazr now does a single thing: it merges and filters multiple feeds into a single stream. Everything else in the product serves that single goal. All of our messages, examples, and ads (when we strart running them soon) will be directed toward that single task. We’re not taking away things like the editor, feed wizards, or incredibly powerful widget. We will just do everything we can to direct attention to the message that Grazr merges and filters feeds into a single stream. The first step in carrying out this plan is redesigning the site. We just put up a new home page for users who are not logged in:

 We also have a new home page for logged in users.

This has been a fascinating learning experience for me personally. I am an old, Eighties software guy, so I like to build big, powerful productivity tools. When we released Grazr 2.0 last October, I thought it was an amazing product. I was surprised to learn that people couldn’t accept a product that did so many things. I kept saying it was like a word processor or a database for feeds that could do all kinds of things, and people would look at me like I was insane. I knew I was in trouble when marketing people kept saying we should try to use a Swiss Army Knife as our logo. Learning how to build a site that does a single thing has been a struggle. When I look at sites like Twitter and Google News, I see that this is what computer users now want, so this is what I will learn how to build.  I’m not good at it yet, but I am determined to get better. We’ll be working very hard in the coming months to make Grazr.com appear to be a single function site. Then we’ll start building new sites that truly do only one thing.

Our design goal for future sites is: one sentence, one page, one task. This means that it must be possible to describe the entire function of the site in a sentence of 8 words or less, the entire feature set has to be visible on a single Web page, and the user can only perform a single task with the site. Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to disparage the intelligence of the average computer user. I know that people typically use at least 10-20 different sites to accomplish their needed tasks. They just prefer to perform each task on a separate site. That actually takes more work, and understanding of computer systems, than using a single integrated tool. The trick is to create a site that performs a single task so well that people add it to their daily life. I have made it my life’s goal to remove words like platform, suite, collection, and system from my vocabulary. I came out of dot-com retirement two years ago to see if I could learn how to build software again. I guess I still have a lot to learn.

You’ll find a complete listing of the new site’s features on our Guided Tour page, but here is a summary of the latest and greatest in this version:

• Faster Delivery of Feeds. We’ve rebuilt our feed storage and delivery engine from the ground up. This should make feeds appear faster and contain even fresher data.
• Streams. We rewrote our feed code so we could deliver streams. This is what we call Grazr’s new ability to merge and filter feeds. The home page displays 20 topic based streams that will give you a chance to see how useful these are for finding out what’s new on any subject. All together these sample streams combine almost 1,000 feeds. The free version of the site lets you create one stream at a time from one of your own reading lists with up to 50 feeds. You can also filter a stream by keyword, date or media type. When the beta test is completed, we’ll be making paid accounts available that will let you create an unlimited number of streams.
• Feed Wizard. Collecting feeds with our editor has gotten even easier with our new feed wizard. This makes it possible to select from 1,000 popular feeds organized by site and category in easy to use menus.
• Person Wizard. Tracking the activities of all of your friends on social sites has also gotten easier with this addition to our editor. You can add feeds from over 50 social sites for your own online identity or that of your friends.
• Ads on Pages. It finally had to happen. After 2 years we’ve put ads on the site, but have no fear, there are still no ads in our free widget, and we won’t put ads into the widgets in the future.
• Paid Accounts Coming Soon. Once this beta period is over, we will be adding paid accounts. These will allow unlimited numbers of merges and filters, and the highest level account will accept an unlimited number of feeds in a single stream. This is the ultimate firehose for those who can’t get enough feed data. Paid accounts will also add password protected widgets, and printing of feed data to PDF files.

I want to assure everyone that all of our existing free features will remain free. Whatever you have been doing for free with Grazr.com and our widgets will remain available exactly as it has been in the past. Thanks to everyone for your support over the last two years. We look forward to bringing you the best possible platform for feeds.

The original goal of the list editor on Grazr.com was to make it as simple as possible to create a reading list by dropping links to pages and feeds. Along the way we ended up building a pretty good outlining tool, although that was not our priority when we released version 2.0. Now that we are entering the cleanup phase of version 2.1 we decided to put in some more time polishing the rough edges in the editor. We now have a new version running that goes a long way towards that goal. We have improved the ability to move items around in deeply nested folders, and cleaned up the way text is handled when you are dropping or editing large blocks of text. We are still fighting to make text as clean looking as possible when it contains odd HTML entities. Doing all of this in a purely Javascript based tool is quite a challenge, especially when we want to fully support IE, Firefox, and Safari in OS X, Windows XP, and Vista. I think this new version of the editor is a big improvement, and I’d welcome any comments about what you think still needs to be done.

The other major posting feature we just released is the ability to post any widget to Twitter. First you need to enter your Twitter username and password into the Settings page for your account on Grazr.com.

Then you can create an automatic tweet for any reading list by selecting “Twitter” from the Share menu on a Grazr.com Read page or from the widget’s Share menu.

The resulting tweet includes the reading list’s title, and a link to the matching read page.

We just released a cool new enhancement to both Grazr.com and all the widgets already on Web pages. You can now post any reading list directly to all of the major blogging tools: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress.com, and WordPress hosted on any other server. You can see an example of this by looking at today’s daily news widget on the Grazr site, and the matching post on this blog. The blog post created with this feature automatically includes the reading list’s picture and description as well as it’s widget. This is so much easier than copying the widget’s embed code and pasting it in by hand. To perform this automatic posting, you first have to log into Grazr.com and enter your blog’s parameters in the Settings page.

Once these settings are entered, you can post any reading list to your blog by selecting the ”Blog” item from the Read page Share menu.

You can also post any widget you find on any Web page to your blog by selecting “Blog” from the widget’s Share menu.

This feature has a multiplicative effect, because anyone who finds a widget on your blog can also post it to their own blog with a single click.

Our widget has a lot of display options, and one problem has long been the need to enter these each time you create a widget. We have now added a page of display settings to each account that lets you choose the formatting defaults to use whenever a widget is created. These settings are also used on the read page, and the new automatic blog page. You can reach these settings by clicking the Settings menu item, and then clicking Display.

We have also added a profile sidebar for each user to the new blog page, and the older file listing page. The information for this profile is entered by clicking the Settings menu item at the top of each page, and then clicking the Profile link:

Along with descriptive text, this page also lets you upload an image for your profile.

We are continuing the version 2.1 rollout, and yesterday we released a new feature that I’m really pleased with. Ever since we launched the new editor in October, users have told me that they wanted a place to post widgets so others could see them. This made it clear that many of our users didn’t have a public blog, although they usually had a private location for the widgets, like the iGoogle desktop. So we decided to create an automatic blog for each user. Now all the reading lists you create or import to Grazr.com will be displayed in reverse chronological order on a page with the url of:
http://grazr.com/blog/[username]

For example, the blog page for the daily news widget is at http://grazr.com/blog/DailyNewsWidget. When you log into the site, you will see a “Your Blog” button on the menu as a link to this page. Other users can reach this page by clicking a user’s name anywhere on the site.

The picture you assign to a reading list, and the description you write are both used to complete the automatic blog post.

We have begun the rollout of a new set of features we are calling Grazr 2.1. These involve new functionality, a new design, and a new workflow for moving between different parts of the site. I’ll be writing a series of posts in the coming days to explain all the changes. Please visit the site and let me know what you think by commenting on this post.