It seems the recession has bitten Flowgram before it even got into its stride. The service, which allowed you to record notes and audio narration on top of webpages and other material, had obvious applications for journalism (slideshows, tutorials, blogging, training etc.), but it seems we’ll have to look elsewhere.

An email from the service says:

“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.”

Alternative services

There isn’t any service I can think of that allows you to narrate live webpages in the same way. Diigo does allow you to bookmark and annotate webpages (and export to Delicious), and there are screencasting tools like GoView, Jing and Screentoaster. Then there are webconferencing tools, some of which allow you to record what you’re doing on screen.

But if you can think of any specific tools, or have had good or bad experiences with some (most of the above I haven’t tried), let me know.