Grazr Goes 1.0, Relaunches with Video

Grazr.com relaunched late yesterday with a host of new features. (Marshall Kirkpatrick has the Techcrunch writeup) I helped with the site redesign, focusing on demonstrating the capabilities of Grazr as well as making the activity of building a Grazr painless and easy.

One of the new features that I’m most excited about is the ability to watch video from any web page. Here’s a Grazr displaying YouTube videos:

So it’s as simple as that. You can browse YouTube from any web site with a Grazr! In addition to video, we used the homepage to showcase many other types of content. You can listen to podcasts, read news headlines, and create mashups without programming. Basically, anything you can model in RSS you can display using Grazr…in multiple views including the default slider view, the outline view, and the 3-pane view. Each of these views are better suited to certain types of content.

Grazr is unique in the way that it is shared: if you find one on a web site you can get a copy of it immediately by pressing “Get a Free Copy for your Page”. I’m really excited by this feature. When you decide to get one, you are taken to the Grazr build screen, which is technically complicated but conceptually simple: the activity is to build your own Grazr. This page is one that we had to get right in order for the service to be successful: it needs to be simple to build one of these.

Mike, Adam, and the rest of the Grazr folks are pushing the envelope here. They’re building Grazr on the back of RSS, OPML, and other aggregation formats in order to provide an easy way to share and view feeds. And sharing, as we all know, is the way to grow in an attention economy.