I loved that site and am very sad to see it go. The service was a lot of fun to use. Given how recently the company has received substantial media attention and how loyal its small group of users was, this was a real surprise. Can high-end websites for thinking people ramp up and monetize quickly? This news makes you wonder.

You've reached this page because, at the moment, Brijit is out of money and can no longer afford to bring you the world in 100 words. We're working hard to find a way forward for our service and hope to relaunch in the not-too-distant future. Thanks to all our loyal readers and writers. And to our Brijit writers: payments in full for all abstracts published through May 15 will be made next week.

As you can see from the Compete graph below, traffic was trending up at Brijit after an initial media spike. The company has a really compelling system of "assignments" for review writers and the end result is a great crib-sheet for anyone headed to the periodicals section of a local bookstore on the weekend.

Brijit content is still available on the website here. You can read our previous coverage here. A great article about Brijit in the Washington Post is here. The Post reported in October that the company had raised $1 million in funding. Did it already burn through that, $5 at a time, or has something else happened?

I really hope that this isn't another signal that only lowest-common denominator content is able to monetize and scale online these days. It's hard not to think that Brijit's management must have drastically miscalculated somewhere. A million dollars aint what it used to be, though. Either way, the web will be a less wonderful place if Brijit goes belly up for good.

It's already proven to be a great way to make more informed purchases in the periodical section of your local bookstore, I look forward to using it now to find gems buried in the flood of content available on these social media sites.

Review writers sign up with their Paypal addresses for payment, then claim "assignments" by source or topic area. Up to three reviewers can claim an assignment and each assignment has a deadline before which the review must be submitted. The assignment desk shows a fair amount of reviewer activity so far, though see further discussion of user adoption below.

The whole Brijit site is very elegant in its design and user experience. I love the ability to view the highest rated business stories in the past week, for example. I really like the whole site, in fact. Brijit is one of my favorite services that's launched in the last year. If you're an intellectually curious person who subscribes to too many magazines and doesn't find time to read the best articles, or who likes a good national newspaper and a cup of coffee on the weekends - I think you'll like Brijit too.

The addition of online social media sites is a smart one. Brijit says they will use an algorithm to discover the most interesting articles and videos to assign to reviewers. Bringing the Brijit community of well-read smarties into an editorial position relative to YouTube videos, for example, sounds like a great way to discover the really high-value videos on the site.

Seeking the Nerd Network Effect

The one down-side to Brijit is that it will be a real challenge to grow. Reading a full article on a time schedule and writing a thoughtful review, even if only 100 words, is not an easy task. That's why sites like YouTube, Digg and Techmeme leverage the simplest actions possible by their users to determine what's hot. Brijit would be a much better site if its userbase was much larger and there were multiple reviews on each item, as the company clearly hopes will happen. The company told us it saw "40% month-over-month growth for the first half of April versus the first half March" and that user growth is "accelerating." That's good news.

That said, even with small numbers of users it's a fun site to use. Small numbers of users will not sustain the kind of growth that will make $5 payments per review viable over the long term, but with enough growth and presumably some high-end advertising in the future - hopefully this site can thrive.

Below is a widget displaying the most recent items on Brijit that I've saved for later reading, just one of a number of nice little features you'll find on the site.