It’s been posted about recently that NewsGator Online briefly had advertisements in its interface, and various speculation as to what happened.  So here’s the dealio, straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

We are experimenting with different ways to present information inside NewsGator Online.  We’ve got some good experience here with the various desktop clients we have, and we’ve learned a lot.  The goal is to make the overall online interface faster to use and more efficient for the 90% case, and we have lots of ideas how to get there.  Over the next few months, you’ll see the online product change and evolve.

At the same time, we’re experimenting with advertising in the online reader experience.  In some of the new GUI models, they are pretty unintrusive, and at best they even add something to the whole experience.  But you’ll have to wait and see for more details there.  And yes, we’re aware of some of the potential issues (example) surrounding this, and we’re committed to being a good citizen with respect to these issues.

So what about the ads that were online for an hour or so last Friday, with screenshots floating around on the net?  Some ad-related code has been in the system for a while, but was not intended to be turned on on Friday afternoon.  We have a configuration switch in our system to turn ads on/off, which we use in internal testing; that switch was inadvertantly set to “on” on our online systems.  A simple mistake, which was quickly corrected.