Feedonomics

This blog is really a disgrace. It hasn’t been updated since March 20th, and it is time for me to figure out why. It isn’t that I don’t like to write. That’s pretty much what I do all day. I am always writing up new versions of our product plans for our developers and investors, and communicating by email with our users. It also isn’t blogging per se that I have a problem with. I post on our internal development blog regularly. When I was running my Darwinianweb blog, I had no problem posting several times a day.

I think my difficulty with being a CEO blogger comes from my years spent in the software world of the Eighties. I know that the modern approach to being a software CEO is based on doing everything in public, including talking about features while they are in development. My formative years, however, were in a different environment, when pre-announcing features was attacked as “vaporware,” and Stewart Alsop maintained a list of the worst offenders in this regard. I lived through many examples of companies getting into trouble and even failing due to premature product announcements. At the same time, I basically live in the future. It isn’t just a matter of planning out what to do next. My way of planning is to project myself into a time when the features I want to build are already in place, and then using that future product in my head. These two ways of thinking clearly create a conflict, with the things I spend the most time thinking about being exactly what I feel least comfortable writing about.

The biggest source of this conflict comes from the approach we have taken in creating Grazr. Following the model of Web 2.0 we have been building everything in public, with people using the product since last March, when it was only a few weeks old. At the same time the scope of the final product is so large that I knew from the beginning that it would take at least 12-18 months before people could really see what we were aiming at. For most of this time all that was publicly visible was the widget, so this is what everyone assumed Grazr was, but our real goal has been to create a complete feed management and application development system. This has required us to create a programming language for feeds, a feed database that will allow us to offer features like Read/Unread status and merging of feeds, and a graphical editor for reading lists. To make sure we could support large numbers of users and feeds, we have also had to build a robust server infrastructure. Some of these components are complete, but aren’t visible to users, and some are still in the development stage.

I could have spent the last year telling everyone that Grazr is an application development system for feeds, but that wouldn’t have made sense when all they could see was a widget. On the other hand, we could have actively promoted Grazr as a widget, but then we would have to reeducate the market once the rest of the components were in place. You see, the other major influence on my thinking about software from the Eighties was the book Positioning, which said that once people formed an association with a product it was almost impossible to change it.

My compromise has been to only blog about changes as they appear, and then only describe them as individual features rather than as part of a much larger system to come. So I have been deliberately trying to understate our true goals, which has led me to avoid blogging.

None of this is meant as a criticism of Web 2.0 practices. If we were building Grazr in the Eighties or even the Nineties, we would still be in alpha stage, with only a few outside testers. Instead we have been able to test our ideas with thousands of users, and go through multiple iterations based on user feedback. I think building a product in public is great. I also think CEO blogging is a great way of communicating with users. At the same time, I am an old fart, as can be seen by my use of such offensive terms as “users,” so breaking down my resistance against describing features that aren’t available will be hard to overcome. I’m going to try and post more regularly here, but I have a feeling that I won’t become an active blogger again until we have delivered a complete solution for feed management.

I just saw my first TV ads for the Fisher-Price digital cameras and music players. The website says they are aimed at kids 3 years and older. Adults have made the transition from newspapers and magazines to blog, and now to feeds, but I haven’t seen any signs of feeds as a delivery model for content aimed at young children or teenagers. My kids are between 18 and 23, and although they are immersed in all things digital they have no contact with feeds in any form. Feeds may be used in delivering content to their social sites, like Facebook, but they have no awareness of it. There’s something missing here. Where will the future users of feeds come from? Don’t mainstream media trends move from younger to older users?

He’s right. I had a good reason for stopping and now I have lots of good reasons to start again. I stopped because I found the transition from independent tech observer on my old blog to corporate mouthpiece on this new blog hard to make. I felt like I was caught in the middle between trying to be impartial and trying to be partisan. I have no problem being an advocate for a particular product. Anyone who is old enough to remember dBASE knows that I was a fierce supporter and tireless booster. But even then I was an outsider. I wasn’t an Ashton-Tate employee. I actually viewed myself as the leader of the loyal opposition. Being a CEO blogger takes a completely different mindset, and I needed some time to settle into the CEO role before I started blogging about what we were trying to do here at Grazr Corp. headquarters (which technically is my living room. The conference room and board room is also my dining room).

The other problem I had was trying to talk about Grazr based on the product that has been visible up until now. I guess everyone thinks of Grazr as an RSS widget, while I’ve always thought of it as the presentation layer of an application development system for feeds. Unfortunately I couldn’t really press the issue, because there wasn’t any publicly available functionality to back up that claim. So I was facing massive cognitive dissonance trying to write about Grazr as one thing while thinking about it as another. Like lots of entrepreneurs, I’m more than a little obsessive, and I wanted to keep my head in the space where we were going. I just didn’t want to write about it until we had something to show.

We now have lots of features coming out that will make it clear what it means to be an application development system for feeds, and I’ll be using this blog to announce them and to describe how people will use them.

We’ve decided to try out the new OPML icon from Chris Pirillo in a test version of Grazr. You can see how it looks on our Preview site. I know it isn’t familiar, but this will be an interesting test. I wonder how many days will it take before your brain switches from saying “what is that?” to “hey, an OPML file.” I bet it is less than a month.

 One of my goals for the next year is to help promote the use of “feed” as a generic term for streaming XML formatted data, without the qualifiers of RSS or OPML. This will help the general adoption of the concept. So when the standard RSS icon emerged as an alternative to the little RSS and XML icons, I jumped on it. Now Chris Pirillo has proposed a similar icon for OPML. I like it and hope it gains mass acceptance. We’ll probably try it out in a test version of Grazr and see what people think. Anything that strips away the excessive geekiness of OPML is a good thing.

Dan Farber has an interesting video interview with Greg Reinacker, CTO of Newsgator, on their interest in making feeds available to people who don’t know what RSS is and probably don’t even care about feeds themselves. These users just want the benefits of aggregating data from multiple sources.

Every once in a while Kosso starts bitching and moaning about the ridiculously poor quality of many feeds. He is at it again, and I feel his pain, but what can we do? It sometimes seems as if people who create feeds not only ignore all existing feeds, but deliberately try to come up with ways of screwing them up. It’s like some kind of passive-aggressive rebellion against the rest of the world. Aggregator publishers indulge them in this, by continually adapting to the garbage they find in feeds, and down we go in an ever worsening spiral. Should we just reject bad feeds as unreadable as the XML/Semantic Web purists insist? If we try this approach, users will just blame us for having “bugs” that can’t read their perfectly good feeds. I think complaining about the quality of feeds is like complaining about the weather in Boston, or London for that matter, two cities that Kosso calls home. If it makes you feel better, then go ahead, but don’t expect the situation to ever improve.

This blog will be my new home at Grazr Corp. I plan on exploring the world of feeds and feed management tools and reporting on my findings here. I’ll be doing podcast interviews with creators of feed management tools, and developers who are trying to bring feeds into the corporate world. One of my goals is to show how feeds can be used for much more than just publishing blog content, and as part of that I’ll be posting links to Feed of the Day items that are not related to blogs.

This won’t be an exclusively Grazr related blog. One of the key ideas of this blog will be the growing feed economy, which is made up of many products sharing the same pool of feed data. In time the simple distinction between feed publishers and feed consumers will become increasingly blurred, as feeds pass through many levels of aggregation, dispersion and re-aggregation. The only way for a feed management tool like Grazr to succeed is to work well with every other feed related tool. We need to be able to view feeds served by others and serve feeds that can be viewed by others.

One thing that I especially like about the area of feed management is that nobody in the general public, or even among most knowledgeable computer users, knows what it is. I started working with software in 1979, when the word software wasn’t even known to the general public. They knew what computers were, of course, and even knew that computer programmers did things to make them work, but the word software was still obscure. When I got onto the Web in early 1995, I had to explain to everyone I knew what it meant that I wanted to become a webmaster. I didn’t really know myself. Now I find myself telling my lawyer, accountant, and even my mother, that I can’t really explain what this new company does, because they don’t know any of the verbs or nouns I’d need to use in an explanation. At the same time, RSS has already made a huge impact on computing, and OPML is not far behind. This incredible disconnect between reality and public awareness is a great time to start a new business.  This blog will be an interesting place to record the process of the public’s growing awareness of feeds.