CRAYON!

March 28, 2007 3:28 AM

Before RSS and personalized aggregators such as Personalized Google and NetVibes, there was CRAYON, a service that allowed you to "CReAte Your Own Newspaper" by providing a page with links to chosen sources. [mi]
posted by divabat (11 comments total)

You could add content from any news source anywhere in the world - from C-SPAN's Congress Guide to space imagery from Hubble and even a comic or two. (And if you didn't like any of the options, you could add your own.)

Its creators, Dave Maher and Jeff Boulter, have since moved on, though they do mention what's happened to it:

It has had a great history, being acquired by a small cool internet company who was then acquired by a monstrous operating system company, and somehow we got to keep it and more in the end. We'll save the details for the book.

posted by divabat at 3:28 AM on March 28, 2007

*flashback* wow - had forgotten about this...thanks for the reminder!
posted by davidmsc at 4:15 AM on March 28, 2007

Thanks for the reminder - my account still works! I can forget this whole Web 2.0 thing now.
posted by lukemeister at 6:40 AM on March 28, 2007

That was my homepage a long time ago.

Anyone remember Pointcast?
posted by caddis at 6:54 AM on March 28, 2007

Pointcast... heh. Bane of sysadmins everywhere. Ah, "push", where are you now?
posted by GuyZero at 7:22 AM on March 28, 2007

I'm a news junkie and I read a variety of news sources online, and I'm ashamed to admit I had never heard of CRAYON... I'm trying to figure out what cave I was hiding in when it first appeared... I'm going to make an account right now... Thanks for this post!
posted by amyms at 8:22 AM on March 28, 2007

I use crayon every day.
posted by nomisxid at 10:40 AM on March 28, 2007

It recognizes my ten-year-old, three-jobs-ago email address, but I can't remember my password...
posted by Sweetie Darling at 10:51 AM on March 28, 2007

Holy cow. It remembers my email address from roughly 12 years ago. And I remember what I used to use back then for a throwaway password when security wasn't important. I'm in. Wow. Haven't seen that for a while.
posted by George_Spiggott at 10:59 AM on March 28, 2007

Wow, blast from the past.

And Pointcast was a brilliant idea done too soon and too wonky. There is nothing inherently "wrong" with push. Today it is small push causes automatic pull. How's it really that different?

I love how people who make fun of "push" probably love their Blackberrys and RSS.

But of course some tech trends completely mystify me. I was sure that Active Desktop was going to revolutionize the personal computer. I spent 2 years thinking it just needed another 6 months to really "hit".

Oh well.
posted by Ynoxas at 12:45 PM on March 28, 2007

I must have had 87 different CRAYON newspapers, I kept forgetting the login details. It was more fun to pick the news sources again each time than to actually read the news anyway.
posted by etoile at 10:06 AM on March 30, 2007