Another one bites the dust…

One of the more promising tools that I had seen in the last year was Flowgram. I had used it to do a few tutorials and to show people just how easy it is to create a learning path for people with your voice and few good links. However, now it seems as though that is all coming to an end. I received this e-mail this morning:

Dear Flowgram user:

Today is a sad day for us. We have decided to terminate the Flowgram service as of the end of the month (June 30th, 2009).  The service received excellent reviews and had an enthusiastic core user base. However, we were not able to demonstrate (especially in these economic times) that Flowgrams would ever be prevalent enough for us to adequately monetize the business, either though ads or subscriptions. This is obviously very disappointing, but building the Flowgram platform was a lot of fun, and it was wonderful to see how many of you used our tool to express yourselves in a deep and meaningful way.

Although you won’t be able to play your Flowgrams after the end of the month,  you can export them to video by clicking “share” from the website or “more sharing options” from the Flowgram player and scrolling down to the export to video section.  It is very important, if you wish to keep your content, that you export to video and download the video by the end of the month.  Please let us know at support@flowgram.com if you have any difficulties doing this.

Again, I would like to thank you for your support, for your Flowgrams and for your good wishes.

Best Regards
Abhay Parekh (Founder) and the rest of the Flowgram Team

So it goes.

I definitely see more of this happening in the near future. In fact, I am basically scared for all of the tools I use, and at this point, I would like to flat out state that if the following tools would let me pay for their service, I would gladly do so just to ensure that there are there tomorrow:

1. Twittter
2. Screentoaster
3. Delicious
4. Google Reader
5. Youtube

So if any of these services are reading this blog:

Please develop a sound business model, or at least open up your platform so that others can keep it going after you have run out of money.