Grazr, the mini OPML browser that puts mortal widgets to shame, just launched version 1.0. The Grazr team is led by founder Michael Kowalchik and Adam Green - who as CTO at Andover.net, the parent of Slashdot and many other sites, took the company to its IPO. What are they up to today? Something very forward looking. I really like Grazr and I think the company’s plan for the future is very smart.
Grazr is a service that displays OPML files (outlines most commonly made of bundled RSS feeds) in an easily read format that you can interact with inside the Grazr box. It’s a joy to use; flip through the embedded Grazr display on this page by clicking on title links and using the left sidebar or arrow keys to go back up a level in the outline. It’s literally a way to graze dyanmic information nested in outline form.
We’ve created and displayed here an OPML file that highlights blog posts, photos and video about the history of Grazr. You can read the blog posts, view the photos and play video and podcasts inside the Grazr display. This could display any OPML file, of course, and I hope you can use your imagination to visualize any number of uses.
The best thing about the service is that it takes no programming knowledge to use; it makes OPML usable by anyone. Building an OPML file may become as common a practice for many people as writing a blog post is today. Grazr isn’t a mini feed reader, it’s a tool for displaying dynamic information in outline form on any web page.
New features in the 1.0 version just released include the following:
- The same type of viral “get your own copy” popularized by online video sites like YouTube. Grazr’s sharing feature lets users easily customize their own displays and modifies the code snippet for placement in many blogging platforms. Adam tells me that ajax start pages will be the next target for the sharing feature.
- Three pane view. There are now several different ways that files can be interacted with inside Grazr, the three pane view, a slider and the traditional single pane option.
- Autodiscovery and feed preview. There’s now a URL window inside Grazr where you can enter any URL. If it’s an RSS or OPML URL you’ll be able to see a live preview of the items in the feeds in your display. If it’s an URL for a webpage that offers feeds, you’ll see a list of all the feeds offered by that page and a preview of them.
- Keyboard controls now let you move around from one level to another.
I’ve been excited about Grazr ever since I first saw it in alpha. I’ve used it in many different circumstances and find it invaluable as a very pleasing way to display the living information inside OPML files. The future of Grazr is even more exciting.
Adam Green told me that the Grazr team expects that in around 2008, RSS will be so widespread that businesses will be desperate to find a way to make their feeds usable. The New York Times RSS page is already absurdly overwhelming. Place that page in a Grazr box and you can have it neatly organized with folders for categories, containing a list of each feed in that category, which in turn can be previewed in real time before users subscribe.
The company also envisions the service as a way to make mashups easier than ever to create. If you can create the data end of a mashup, Grazr will take care of the display.
Green told me that the company has enough money to last through next spring or summer; they’ll go back to their angel investors in Winter and raise some more if they need to. Then they’ll be ready when the web has wrapped it’s collective mind around this sort of service as far more than a widget for sticking on MySpace. At that time they may monetize co-branding, enterprise Grazr servers behind the firewall, or still other options that will solidify in time.
I think this is a company with a great chance of playing a very important roll in the future of the web. As Green said to me today, if HTML was the architecture of Web 1.0, RSS is the architecture of Web 2.0. I couldn’t agree more and I can’t wait to see what this service that was once a little widget grows up to be.
See also BittyBrowser, a related service with similar funcitonality.
i love it!
Sounds like Gopher, circa 1992.
What the heck is all the enthusiasm about?
if rss is to web2.0 what html was to web1.0, nobody is going to make any $ on rss. nice widget though. zzzzzzz.
Love the AJAX
pwb: heh, spot on
“The Grazr team” - does it really take a team and a company to write a widget? Now they will need some VC capital, right?
All it needs for me to really jump in, is realtime sync with popular feedreaders.
Unfortunately I cannot embed it on my wordpress blog because it does not allow javascript widgets.
Addendum: It can be synched with feedreaders that maintain your OPML file on their server.
See this cute little opml. The luckier ones can embed this on their blogs.
http://share.opml.org/opml/top100.opml
I guess I’m stupid. It’s a widget to display OPML data. This is earth-moving … why?
I put it on my site
http://jarinudom.com/my-rss-feeds/
Just rendering OPML files would be cool, this supports inline multimedia consumption, customized reposting and has a more serious long term plan to make OPML easily usable on an enterprise intranet etc. I think this is deceptively simple looking and has lots of potential. OPML enables some really interesting ways to share and display data. Thus the enthusiasm!
Speaking of inline multimedia, it would be great if this thing could show Flash embeds.
I agree with the point above that Grazr is just one of many plays in the space, and it will both grow and evolve…I think this is a component, not a product.
Interesting area though…this is the “Electronic Program Guide” space for online media
I have just been blogging on the whole subject of “Rivers of Data” actually being “Rivers of Cr*p” here as when there is too much data it becomes unusable, and there is a discussion emerging on the “death of RSS” over at techcrunch uk.
“It’s a widget to display OPML data”
This is one of the deceptive things about Grazr. It looks like a widget at first glance but by clicking on the Launch button at top right it launches into a full size window, with a variety of control buttons, views and an address bar. This transforms it into something comparable to a full feed aggregator, although the philosphy of feed grazing is different to that of feed aggregating. A grazer is intended more for glancing at a large dynamic collections of feeds without subscribing.
Disclosure: I’m on the advisory board to Grazr Corp.
thought we already have this, well sort of, in netvibes.
nice work & good luck dude…
Mike Abundo: there are ways of doing that! OPML has the ability to contain any type of embedded content you like - I’m using OPML as a display layer for mashups - and you can put HTML in to OPML (in a hacky kind of way).
For instance, I wrote a little piece of code a while back that turns your digg data in to an OPML file and displays it in Grazr:
http://tools.opiumfield.com/view/digg
but why oh why can’t i just upload my netvibes opml file from my computer? why do i need to host it on the web?
I love, love, love the feed auto-discovery feature. For example, I plugged the link you provided for the NYT feeds page into the Grazr location input. Wa-la! [sic] I am grazing all the NYT content.
This would be great on my Ajax homepage. They should make modules for the popular ones.
This is not a business, nor does it require a “team”… it’s getting ridiculous some of this 1999-dot-com-style stuff that’s seeing the light of day nowadays… seriously, any half decent programmer could code this in a week or two, put up a nice little web page, post an update every so often and get on with some real work in the meantime!
Nice, but it is still MEGA MEGA MEGA MEGA geeky. Won’t go anywhere until the general public can understand it and why it would be useful. Their web site is an opaque mess –almost a parody of geek speak problems.
This is retarded.
OPML is a retarded format and has no other purpose than listing blogrolls, other uses are highly discouraged.
Half of posts here are plain astroturf “Love this” “Wow cool” “It’s viral”
Johan: OPML has it’s problems, but it’s useful as a display layer - and it has a function called ‘inclusion’ which is extremely powerful when combined with Grazr (a friend of me tells me that XInclude mirrors this functionality - but OPML include nodes do it in a much less geeky manner). It’s relatively easy to get things in to and out of OPML - it’s just an XML format, remember. I’m writing tons of little OPML converters - scripts which turn API results in to OPML to display in Grazr and other OPML display tools. This thread isn’t astroturf though. As far as I know, the only people who have posted in this thread who have had any connections with Grazr are James Corbett and myself - James is on the advisory board (as he declared), and I have recently done programming work for Grazr.
Joel: I’m working on remedying that situation by building an unofficial user layer that uses Grazr but makes it much friendlier for users to make and use OPML.
OPML has so many potential uses.
Directories and bundles of feeds are only on (obvious) one.
The whole of podcast.com is build on top of an “(OPML plus RSS) to the power of USERS” paradigm
(and soon we’ll be open for users)
Great work Mike! Nice to see the options for folders or outlines as we chatted about ;p
Here ’s a big Flash OPML reader I made last year :
http://readerss.com/opml/kopml2.html
“Simple” is a great compliment… and this is a nice first step in making OPML content more accessible.
Nice job, hope it flourishes
I guess I just don’t get it. I’m pretty geeky, but every time I hear that OPML will change the world I can’t for the life of me figure out how.
Is XML still cool?
I pasted the URL from the NY Times (in the post above) into the Grazr widget. It displayed some of the feeds on that page, but it also skipped a lot. For example, the Music feed did not show up. What’s up? Am I missing something? Is Grazr broken? Is Grazr selective in what it displays?
grazr works well with my ‘meta’ opml
http://metaholic.com/metaholic.opml
I’m using it on my home page to give visitors a look at my most recent videos…
http://www.stevegarfield.com/
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