RawSugar, a service that has been compared as a del.icio.us competitor, but in actuality had a number of great differentiating features, is in funding trouble. My friend Bill Lazar has some to say about this, as a do a few folks like Steve Rubel.
RawSugar isn’t dead, nor does it deserve to be. One feature it has – the capability to consume and coalesce your personal content streams and tag them – is one that I feel should be adopted by other social media. I was planning to figure out how to leverage it – finally – when the news broke over the holiday. Notice my experimenting with del.icio.us in my right hand menu.
RawSugar, to me, is a victim of two things: 1. A UI that hides the good stuff. It’s front door is little more than a pitch/splash page when it should surface the activity taking place within. 2. A lack of attention in the online press – grassroots and otherwise. No matter what anyone says – there is only so much attention to go around and only a few people who have direct influence over it. Without their attention influence as a help – it takes a groundswell approach – vast numbers of those with lessor influence – helping spread word. It’s possible. But far more difficult. Hence the demand to get noticed by blogs like Techcrunch. Being labeled too easily as a “del.icio.us” competitor – unfairly since it has a host of differentiators – didn’t help either.
I hope they get some funding. In the meantime, Bill is up for some new opportunities.
There is some truth in that to be sure, but there is also truth in that human nature abhors a vacuum. We seek out sources of information and entertainment we decide to trust. And as such, the Web has always created a new opportunity for intermediaries, bundlers of information and entertainment, and aggregators to help manage the flow we partake in each day.