By now you’ve probably seen the announcement for NewsGator Media Center Edition – we’re very excited about this! There is a lot more info here, including lots of screenshots. Check it out! Here’s one as a teaser:

Yep, that’s a video stream from a RSS enclosure playing in the lower left corner. One more click of the remote, and it’s full screen. (And yes, it’s from Microsoft’s Channel 9 video feed)

I think by itself, reading RSS feeds on your TV is interesting…but I also don’t think anyone is going to use the TV as their sole source of text content – if you don’t have a HDTV, it’s a heck of a lot easier to read text on your computer screen. BUT…when you combine content like this on your TV, with the synchronization capabilities of NewsGator Online Services, you have a much more compelling story. Read/view some of your content on TV, including multimedia. Perhaps during commercials. :-) Read other (overlapping) content on your desk. Read some of it on your mobile phone. And the system keeps track, the whole time, of what you’ve read and where – so you don’t have to waste time.

Whew! That sounded like a marketing blurb, right off of my own keyboard. Sorry about that. But come on, I have to say cool things about our new products! But maybe others can say it better – here are a couple of quotes from this morning:

RoudyBob – “They are way ahead of the game here.”

Omar – “I’ve been using this for a few weeks and it’s damned cool.”

Matt – “This is very slick.”

And I’ll leave you with one more quote, from this morning’s press release:

“NewsGator Media Center Edition is a great example of cutting edge ISV innovation on the Microsoft platform,” said Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of Developer and Platform Evangelism at Microsoft Corporation. “The deep integration of technologies like XML and RSS, combined with rich multimedia, and presented on a device as pervasive as the television, gives consumers access to the information they care about, where and when they want to view it, truly delivering on the vision of a connected home. We’re proud to work with NewsGator to help bring this innovative application to market for our mutual customers.”

I’d like to publicly welcome John Carmichael to the NewsGator Technologies management team, as Director, Business Development. John comes from a strong marketing and business development background, and we’re very excited to have him!

John’s first day was today, and his white board is already filled. :-) I’m sure he can’t wait to see what will happen tomorrow!

I’ll post a link to his weblog as soon as he’s ready to be a public figure…within the next week or two, I would suspect.

Ok, Gordon posted this about 3 weeks ago – so I’m a little behind. Very cool, though – he’s using the ability of NewsGator to map custom RSS extensions to columns in Outlook:

NewsGator can render custom columns. This allows you to sort a folder by your custom field; price, in this case.

In order to support this, you can download and import custom field mappings. In the Options dialog, on the Rendering pane. Press the “Column Mappings” button, then “Import”, and select the field mappings file you downloaded.

 

[The 80/20 Solution]

This is so cool. Since the first release of NewsGator for Outlook, you’ve been able to right-click on a feed link in Internet Explorer and select “Subscribe in NewsGator”.

Now you can do the same thing in Firefox – many thanks to Stuart Hamilton for putting this together!

A recent post on javageek.org says that Reinacker & Associates, Inc. and NewsGator Technologies are giving customer email addresses to spammers.

Just to clear things up, this is absolutely NOT TRUE. We don’t share ANY private customer information with any third party. For that matter, we almost never even use these email addresses ourselves, except to reply to specific inquiries; all customer communication is done via RSS.

I’m not sure what could have happened in this particular case, but we will investigate it as soon as I can get in touch with the author of the above post.

UPDATE: they posted a retraction here. It turns out the javageek.org guy posted a comment here on my weblog with his email address, which was published with the post, and obviously scraped off the page by spammers.

A great review of NewsGator 2.0 and NewsGator Online Services in PC Magazine. I can’t decide what to quote from it, so I’ll just leave it to you to click through and read it. :-)

Wow, I just get done talking about some cool extensions for NewsGator 2.0, and another one pops up.

John Bristowe and Jeff Julian have built an ESF extension for NewsGator. With this extension installed, if a feed publishes information about an event in a certain way, a new item will get added to Outlook’s calendar with the event details.

John has a sample feed and a screenshot in Outlook on his weblog…check it out. This is really beginning to demonstrate the power of RSS extensions, when used with an extension-aware client. Nice job, guys!

A couple of very cool new NewsGator extensions worth mentioning:

NNTP Posting plug-in: Matt Hawley has built a plug-in/extension combination to allow posting to NNTP newsgroups directly from NewsGator and Outlook. Very nice!

FetchLinks: Graeme Foster has built a plug-in which will retrieve the linked content from a web site, for feeds that only provide links or excerpts, and store the content in Outlook.

Nice job, guys! Both of these address very common requests we hear from customers.

We’re looking at ways to build a community site so great efforts like these can be more easily found by our customers. More info will follow when we get something together.

Mark Fletcher of Bloglines has been writing some interesting things lately. First, in a response to Jim Louderback’s recent article (discussed here), Mark writes:

“I agree with your article on eWeek about Newsgator creating a walled garden.”

I already pointed out how we’re not creating any kind of walled garden, and Jim Louderback agreed with that after some discussion. It’s difficult to say if Mark knew what we’re doing with NewsGator Online Services…I would assume he did, but it’s possible he didn’t.

Today, Martin Tobias writes on his weblog:

“I have used Radio UserLand before, but I will try NewsGator this time. Hope it doesn’t come with too much spyware.”

To which Mark responds:

“I humbly ask that you give Bloglines, our web-based news aggregator, a try. No downloads, no worries about nasty spyware, and it’s accessible…”

Come on, Mark. You know there’s no spyware in NewsGator. But by saying there’s no spyware worries with Bloglines, you’re implying there are worries with NewsGator.

I talk to a lot of press folks – every week. I’ve mentioned Bloglines to many of them. And I have never once said anything negative about it, or even implied anything negative.

So I make a public request of Mark. Please don’t spread FUD about NewsGator. I’m sure you’re well aware that we have NOTHING to do with the “evil” Gator spyware/adware.

A few days ago, Brian Livingston wrote an article for eWeek talking about NewsGator 2.0 and NewsGator Online Services (NGOS).

Today, Jim Louderback wrote a response for eWeek, which I’d like to publicly respond to. The first few paragraphs describe RSS…and then:

But there are a few problems with the service…the NewsGator service requires that a special API be used to access feeds inside that service. Alas, that API is not freely available and is completely non-standard—in other words this newsfeed service could turn RSS into a nasty walled garden.

This argument doesn’t follow. We’re not in any way trying to create a “walled garden”. Here are the facts:

1. There is no special API to access feeds within our service – it’s just normal RSS or Atom.

2. Even our subscriber-only feeds (such as custom search feeds or premium content feeds) can be accessed from any RSS-aware tool that supports authentication. And most mature RSS tools support this.

3. The API that was discussed in Brian’s article, the API that he mentioned hasn’t been published yet, is only used for the following functions:

• Subscription synchronization. So if there are multiple tools, such as NewsGator for Outlook, NewsGator Web Edition, and perhaps another application that is built by a customer, they can synchronize their subscriptions and read/unread/downloaded information via the API.
• Adding custom search feeds or premium content feeds. If you want to build, say, a custom search feed, we have an API that can be used to build and set up the feed…then you can access it via any RSS client.

It’s not a bad idea, but unfortunately the tiny NewsGator company has been eclipsed, after just a few weeks, by powerful Yahoo.

Cast your vote for free choice, and away from restricted, proprietary services, by using open RSS news readers and all feeds. Walling RSS up inside a proprietary garden is wrong.