Grabb.it Shutting Down

It is with great regret that I have to announce that Grabb.it will be shutting down operations at the end of this month. After almost two years of operation, we’ve simply run out of resources and can no longer keep the site online in its current form.

Even as we shut down, we are committed to avoiding simply vanishing into the digital ether and to preserving all of the amazing blog posts written by our thousands of users. In that spirit, we have decided to leave archived versions of the Grabb.it blogs in place permanently at their current urls. At the end of the month, we will turn off the searchable and listenable core of the site and publish each blog with all of its current posts on its own a single page (at its already existing URL; for example, mine is: http://grabb.it/users/greg). If you wish to export your blog posts into another service, the RSS feed on your blog will contain all of your posts and should make that transition relatively easy.

In addition, we will be making publicly available a significant chunk of the data Grabb.it gathered in two years of spidering the internet for music. While this data will not contain mp3s or other audio files, it will contain everything we learned about what sites were talking about what songs and artists. We hope this information will be useful to cultural historians of the early 21st century, internet technologists hoping to figure out how to improve the experience of music on the web, and many others. We will publish the data in SQL and CouchDB formats. More details as things are finalized.

On behalf of Jem and Chris, I’d like to thank everyone who supported Grabb.it from our investors to our users to our fellow geeks and musicians. While this was not the outcome any of us were hoping for when we began this project, it doesn’t diminish the joy we got out of you and out of the music while it lasted.