Then each went to his own home

As various blogs already posted, RawSugar has closed its research and development efforts. That is, the service will still be up for a while but there won’t me new features or bugfixes (see Rawsugars announcement).

I’m sad to hear this as I was a happy user of RawSugar. It was the only tag based service that didn’t just copy delicious to add a new features or polished design.
Apart from a few academic papers and proof of concept applications I never saw anything new in the tagging world until Rawsugar came up with its implementation of tag clustering and auto-tagging. These features probably need some more polish but they were steps into the right direction.

It’s not hard to decide where I should move all my bookmarks: Simpy has nice search features, a friendly user base and a very likeable developer. Otis does care for Rawsugar users and implemented an importer.

Apart from that decision I’m left to ask: "what was wrong with RawSugar?". I think this is an important question as tagging is web 2.0 and web 2.0 most certainly is another bubble going to pop somewhen – the question then is who is going to stay.

what was wrong?

Knowing that I’m not in the best position to analyze, I have a go figuring out why this project failed. Some of these objections I already mentioned, some can be found reading some (sometimes very mean: has techcrunch turned into digg?) comments.

user interface

The web site has always been too cluttered. The page structure even grew with the number of features. Rawsugars biggest competitor, delicious, was always very reluctant in exposing new features to the user.
Then its whole look doesn’t really fit into the web 2.0 world (Ok, delicious isn’t that much better, before the redesign about a year ago it looked like plain xhtml without any styling). It’s not about rounded corners, it’s about freshness. RawSugar always felt a little bit heavy (although it had the best response times).

interaction with community

I always felt like RawSugar doesn’t have the early adopters in mind: For questions it did use a forum, its developers weren’t really involved in the blogosphere. But then they wanted to gain ground in the blogosphere. It very much focused on a feature called "tag search for your blog" (you can see this feature in action when you switch to the index view of this blog, it is a very good feature indeed). This just didn’t really fit. It didn’t feel they were "of us". I hope you get what I mean – I cannot really describe it

ah well..

Maybe these arguments are all in vain. Why did delicious take off? Because it was the first social bookmark service (in fact it wasn’t)? There are many things Rawsugar did right. Why didn’t the user base grow more substantially? I’m keen to hear your thoughts!

Anyway – best luck to all the guys involved in RawSugar. Especially Frank – I did have a great time with you preparing our talk for www2006!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under RawSugar, Simpy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.