Wow, what a crazy month it has been.  As I mentioned last week, we launched new versions of FeedDemon and Inbox last week, and the NetNewsWire beta is getting more and more widespread…and the new look for NewsGator Online has been extremely well received.

On a less visible front, our private label business is really ramping up.  Some clients have gone live, and others are running private betas.

All of this has combined to create a 30% growth in certain key load-related metrics of our online platform in the last 30 days.  You read that right – 30% growth.  Wow.  Here’s another tidbit – our daily new-subscriber numbers are more than triple what they were 30 days ago.

We of course plan for growth, many months out.  We know what our average growth rates are, and we add capacity accordingly.  The challenge here has been that we didn’t expect this dramatic growth in March – and we were basically caught a little behind on our capacity planning.  The good news, however, is that everything has stayed up and running well.  And if you’re using a client like FeedDemon or NewsGator Inbox, and synchronizing with NewsGator Online, you’re probably not noticing anything at all.

No worries, though. At certain times during the day, the system is a little bit slower than normal for certain users…but we’re adding significant capacity as quickly as we can get it shipped and installed.  Within the next week or so, everything should be back to normal!

NewsGator has had a web API using SOAP for some time.  It’s been very popular – it’s used in our own clients (NewsGator Inbox, FeedDemon, and NetNewsWire), third party clients such as RSS Bandit, and private label customers (online, but unlaunched as of yet). We currently process millions of API calls per day in our online system, and the API is also implemented in NewsGator Enterprise Server.

There has been quite a bit of feedback from developers about the API; most of this feedback centered around the lack of a REST version of the API.  We’ve found that some developers have never used SOAP, and there is a learning curve on certain platforms to learn a SOAP toolkit; other developers just don’t want the extra complication in the messages, and prefer a REST solution.

Whatever your reasoning, though, you can now choose for yourself. We now have both SOAP and REST versions of the NewsGator Online API available.  The SOAP version has been around for a while, and is used by our own products.  The REST version is brand new, is documented here, and enters a public beta today.  So try it out, and let us know what you think – we’re looking for feedback!

Well, the teams are exhausted :-), but this is a HUGE multi-product release day!

First, FeedDemon 2.0.  It’s been a long time in coming, but now it’s done.  It of course includes FeedStation 2.0…but FeedStation is also available as a separate download if you want to grab it separately to use just with NewsGator Online or NewsGator Inbox.  A huge thanks and congrats to Nick Bradbury, who I think has been on a caffiene high for quite a while getting this release ready.

Next, NewsGator Inbox 2.6.  As I mentioned earlier, we changed the name of NewsGator Outlook edition to NewsGator Inbox…and added a ton of new features that folks have been asking for.  More thanks and congrats here go to Nick Harris (who still doesn’t have a blog, but now that I’ve mentioned it twice maybe he will!), who I think worked himself right into the ground preparing this release with his team.

NewsGator Online now has a whole new look.  It adds a number of small features, like favicons and such…but the real news here is it has set us up to quickly add a ton of new features and capabilities that are on the backlog.  And the purchase process for new products is finally as easy as can be, integrating multiple products and subscriptions in a way that makes sense, and old subscription plans have been consolidated into the new catalog of options.  A huge thanks and congrats here to the online team – Tim, Demi, Noel, Dede, Brian, and James…and to the platform guys – Darryl, Glenn, Jeff, Gordon, Chris, and Rob.

And finally, as of these releases we’ve made good on our promise to abolish the subscription model as you used to know it.  Now, you can buy FeedDemon or NewsGator Inbox (and soon NetNewsWire) for $29.95, and you’ll get a free year subscription which includes value-added services such as synchronization (and lots more to come).  At the end of that year, you can choose to renew your subscription if you wish for $19.95.  But if you choose not to renew, your software will continue to work forever – just without the online-specific features.

So all in all, a busy day…let us know what you think!

Quite a day today…the product that started NewsGator, NewsGator Outlook edition, has a new name!  It’s now called NewsGator Inbox, and v2.6 release candidate 1 is available now.  This product has sure come a long way since the first prototype, and the 1.0 release, over 3 years ago.  Congrats to Nick Harris, the lead developer on NewsGator Inbox, who doesn’t have a blog I can link to (but maybe this will shame him into it! :-)

There’s a LOT of new features, including clippings sync (the first NewsGator product to do this), greatly enhanced podcasting support, improved synchronization with the NewsGator platform, and too much more to mention.  And of course, the synchronization in NewsGator Inbox works similarly to our other products – not only feed sync, but sync of individual items and read-states, and dramatic performance gains over “traditional” aggregators.

So take a look – details are in the forum post here!

You know it’s a busy day when we have a mobile announcement as cool as this and I’m the last to blog about it. :-)

So here’s the deal. NewsGator is into mobile in a big way, and we’ve had a mobile HTML reader for quite some time (hint – if you’re an existing subscriber, go here to find the mobile configuration area). But it’s time for much more than this.

Today, we announced a couple of things. First, we acquired SmartFeed and SmartRead for Windows Mobile, and hired Kevin Cawley (their creator) in the process. You can download the free previews of the applications right now; we’re working on a number of changes right now, including making them dramatically faster, and we expect to have a public beta available in the next month or so.

At the same time, we also announced our J2ME reader, for java-enabled devices.  This should be available in beta right around the same time, and will provide a similar experience to the windows mobile reader.

But why?

Well, here’s the thing.  We’ve always been about “any time, any place, any device.”  We’ve had a great story about it up to now, with rich applications for the web, Outlook, Windows, the Mac, Windows Media Center, and a lighter experience for HTML-capable mobile devices.  All of these applications sync together (FeedDemon and NetNewsWire in their current betas), and it’s really a great experience.

But on mobile devices, we found the experience wanting.  Using the HTML mobile app ourselves, and watching others use it, it’s very handy – but not as streamlined as it could be.  And there are certain missing functions – saving items to clippings, etc.  Some of these features are being added, but some are difficult to implement effectively in the confines of a mobile browser.

Enter the rich mobile clients.  These clients provide a great experience, tailored for the device you’re using.  Download items, save them, even browse for new feeds; they really take the mobile content experience to the next level.  And they can provide better responsiveness, even on low bandwidth connections like GPRS.

But there are already mobile clients out there; why NewsGator?

Well here’s the thing.  And I’m sure I’ll get some raised eyebrows for this, and at least one hate mail…but in my opinion, a mobile RSS aggregator is useless if it’s not synchronized with the rest of your life.

Useless?  Yep.  Other than the first week after we buy a new phone or PDA, when we play with absolutely everything, most of us use mobile devices as an extension of our everyday lives.  It’s not the only device we use – it’s a companion device that we use when we’re not sitting at our desk, or with our laptop on.  And it’s certainly not the only place we want to consume content.

When these mobile applications are synchronized with NewsGator Online and the rest of the suite of products, though, they become much more powerful.  Now it’s synchronized with your primary content application (be it NG/Online, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Outlook, or whatever other application you use), and you can use it as a companion device.  It’s amazingly efficient.

If you’re going to MIX, be sure to come to the RSS talk, where you’ll see current (and private) builds of both the NewsGator windows mobile application, and the new version of NetNewsWire!  And _much_ more – I’ll write some more about this next week.

And in the meantime…make sure your mobile data plan is active, and watch for NewsGator’s mobile beta launches.  And a big “welcome” to Kevin Cawley!

Cool!

SharePointGator

I’d been working on this webpart ages ago to enter into the NewsGator API competition but didn’t end up getting it finished in time to submit it. Left it sitting in the projects folder for a couple of months until I decided to finish it this weekend as I was feeling a little ill and didn’t want to leave the house!

So what’s it all about then? Well I called it SharePointGator (no doubt infringing on some copywrite), as it’s a NewsGator webpart for SharePoint. Using the NewsGator webservice and your newsgator account details you can now view the rss feeds and unread blog posts from your newsgator account in SharePoint.

What do you get when you put a client guy (Nick Bradbury) and an API guy (Gordon Weakliem) in a room together for an hour?

Insanely fast content retrieval/sync.

Last night I was playing with the new public FeedDemon 2.0 beta 2 release.  I downloaded my content, read through it, and a while later did one last full retrieve before leaving.  I have about 150 feeds.  How long do you suppose that last full retrieve took?

About 4 seconds.

How could it be this fast?  Well, in the normal case when you click “refresh” in an aggregator with 150 feeds, it will go hit those feeds and see if there is new content.  Many of them will return 304’s indicating they’re not modified, but even that takes time.

With the NewsGator API, you make one call that asks which of your feeds have updated content that you don’t already know about.  In my situation above, it said there were six such feeds.  It then retrieved content for those six feeds…and all this took a total of about 4 seconds.  150 feeds completely up to date – with very little bandwidth used, in very little time.  Very cool.

And a tease for the Mac folks out there waiting for a new build of NetNewsWire – Brent Simmons was in the same room with Nick and Gordon. :-)  It won’t be too long now!

For those who are wondering how to ping NewsGator’s system when a feed is updated…the ping endpoint is

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

It implements the standard XML-RPC ping protocols.

This has been up for ages, and is used by ping-o-matic, pingoat, feedburner, and others…but I don’t believe it’s actually documented on the site anywhere. So, rather than my having to dig around looking for it every time someone asks, this will hopefully get it google-able. :-)

The San Francisco Chronicle is the first customer to go live with NewsGator’s private label hosted solution…you can see it live at http://www.sfgate.com/myfeeds/. It’s a complete RSS experience, integrated into their existing web site, with content chosen by their editors that they feel will appeal to their users.

Users can of course subscribe to any content they wish…but a big part of this is the fact that their editors can add value for their users in a couple of ways. First, they can select feeds for their feed “catalog” – helping users get to the content they might be interested in quickly. And second, they create “editor’s choice” feeds with snippets of content from around the net. They of course use NewsGator’s tools to find and select this content, and we distribute it to users who have selected that content. Their users are no longer limited to only SFGate.com content – they can view content from anywhere, right within the SFGate.com user experience.

Take a look! We’re very excited to be providing this technology to the San Francisco Chronicle and other publishers, and we’ll be demonstrating some of the capabilities of the system at DEMO this morning. If you’re here at the conference, be sure to come visit us afterwards!