Interview

Continuing his series, Harold Check has published an interview with me on his weblog – The New Net Architects, Part IV – Greg Reinacker. A quote from the interview:

Syndication will change things. For a taste, look at the early adopters of syndication technology, and how much they say it has changed their online habits, and how much it has changed their lives.

I very much enjoyed reading his earlier installments of this series with Luke Hutteman, Mark Fletcher, and Brent Simmons…check them all out!

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Reminiscing

I was just flipping through some old posts here on my blog. It’s been fun – a lot of it really takes me back to what was going on at the time. Like an online diary. I know, I know, people have been reflecting on this for ages, but I finally have posts that are old enough it’s fun to go back and read them :-).

I’m going to try to start writing some more here, as soon as things calm down a little. Some of my favorite posts here have been about non-work-related stuff…so hopefully I can squeeze some more of that in too.

Some of my favorites –

Semiconductor physics – to those who know me well, you know this has to be a favorite. :-)

Most eligible bachelorettes – darn it, neither Sandra nor Britney called.

Valvoline runoffs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) – tidbits from one of the highlights of my racing career thus far, the 2002 SCCA national championship.

First race at Arizona Motorsports Park – I’m glad I wrote about this…since as it turns out, this was the last race there I would get to go to before the track closed.

Driving (1, 2) – musings on understeer/oversteer, and front/rear wheel drive. Some of the most fun I’ve had writing on my weblog…

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Travel by Messenger

It’s not all that often that I post about some new technology that I see, but today’s going to be an exception.

As some of you know, I used to do development consulting in the travel business. Well today, I was fortunate enough to get a glimse of a new application from TravelMessenger, the likes of which I haven’t seen before. It’s basically an automated travel agent, which you interact with via MSN Messenger:

Very interesting. It’s got some quirks at the moment, but it’s a great demo. I’m not completely convinced I would book a trip this way, but maybe – it’s definitely got potential. With some good AI work, I think this could become something very different than most of us are used to – in a good way. I’m told this will go into a limited beta next week…

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NewsGator Media Center Edition in Online Spotlight

From today’s announcement:

NewsGator Technologies announced that the recently launched NewsGator Media Edition is featured in Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004’s “Online Spotlight”

This is pretty cool. Now anyone with a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 PC can get to NewsGator Media Center Edition without having to download a thing. And when new users are browsing around in the Media Center interface, they will see NewsGator – right next to MSN and ESPN.

So your homework for tonight…go to your local Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, or whatever your preference. Find a Media Center PC, pull up Online Spotlight, and go into News/Sports. Behold that which is NewsGator…and tell the passers-by that THIS is the reason they need a Media Center PC! :-)

(ok, maybe that was a little over the top…but hey, it’s Friday!)

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NewsGator in the news

In case you’ve missed it, there has been some great press recently, mentioning NewsGator and NewsGator Online Services:

New York Times: Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information (June 3, 2004)

“There is also a subscription service that can coordinate your news feeds across several devices – say, a cellphone, a home PC and an office computer – so that you never inadvertently read the same headline twice. It can even be directed to send traffic information only to your cellphone and movie news to your home computer.”

Detroit Free Press: Keep Track of Web Favorites (June 2, 2004)

“Among a new generation of software and services that shield the underlying complexity of RSS are two new products from NewsGator Technologies…both products are well designed and show a degree of professional polish missing from many first-generation efforts.”

And an excellent in-depth review of both products in EContent Magazine’s May issue:

EContent Magazine: NewsGator 2.0 & NewsGator Online Services: EContent Decision Maker Review (May 1, 2004)

“NewsGator takes this product – and news aggregators in general – to a new level.”

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NewsGator in Wired

Yikes…I hate to see NewsGator getting slammed in an article. I’d like to respond to the “problems” the author, Ryan Singel, found with NewsGator:

It has troubles with sites that use a third party to take care of their feeds (latimes.com, for example, uses NewsIsFree.com for Web syndication). With that kind of feed, you need to click on a link essentially twice.

It doesn’t have any trouble with these sites; NewsGator shows exactly the content that the publisher puts in the feed. If it’s only a headline and/or excerpt, as with the feeds he mentions, that’s all that will be shown.

There is also a NewsGator extension from Graeme Foster called FetchLinks, which will selectively retrieve the linked page into Outlook in situations like this. This can address the underlying inconvenience he’s talking about with these particular feeds.

There also doesn’t seem to be a way to rearrange the feeds, which are displayed alphabetically. Moreover, while grouping feeds into folders is possible, NewsGator cannot show you all the items in a folder or even tell you how many items are in there.

This is how Outlook works. One of the real value-adds of NewsGator is the fact that it works within Outlook, and you don’t need to learn new tools and new ways of working. Folder arrangement and unread counts work exactly as they do with email folders.

And we do of course show unread message counts for folders, as shown here.

Further, using Outlook organizational capabilities such as search folders can make a big difference in the way you use the product. Again, since NewsGator is built into Outlook, it has a huge amount of flexibility. More info on search folders with NewsGator here and here.

NewsGator is useful for those who don’t want another application running. But it’s best only for those who read a handful of news sources and don’t mind clicking multiple times to see a story.

Only useful for those who read a handful of news sources? Hmm…Robert Scoble has said publicly many times that he reads over 1400 weblogs and news sources with NewsGator. I’m not sure what else I can say – 1400 is a lot of feeds, and NewsGator is the tool that makes it possible for him.

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Video, Media Center, and Channel 9

By now just about everyone has heard about Channel 9. One of their video feeds is a featured feed inside of NewsGator Media Center Edition.

When development started for our Media Center edition, we picked up some MCE machines for development and testing. But things have been so busy that I never had a chance to watch a “real” video all the way through; we had some short test videos to test our system when a video completed, and I’m sure some folks around here had watched “real” videos, but not me.

So about a week ago, during a rare hour away from my desk, I plopped on the couch and watched a few of the complete Channel 9 videos in NewsGator MCE…and made a couple of observations:

1. Watching video clips on MCE was fun. Well, as fun as watching an interview with a ‘softie can be. :-) No, seriously, I rarely watch video on my PC, and almost NEVER work-related videos. There’s something about a tiny little window in Media Player that just doesn’t do it for me.
 
But on TV, it’s totally different. One click of the remote in NewsGator MCE, and it was full-screen. It was similar to watching an interview on the evening news. I could sit on the couch with a beer, and watch my choice of content. Press a button when I got bored, and go to a different one.
 
It didn’t feel like I was wasting time at my desk – it felt like I was watching TV, albeit with technical content. It’s a different emotional experience. Very different. And better.
 
2. Some of the Channel 9 videos (especially the wander-the-halls one with Chris Sells) did an amazing job of exactly what they were supposed to do. I felt like I was there. I felt like I was being introduced in person to these folks. Which was cool – probably 70% of the people in that particular piece, I’ve interacted with online in some way. Seeing the relatively informal video made me feel like I knew them better now.
 
Which is a double-edged sword. When I meet some of them in person, I’ll have to remember they haven’t met me. ;-)
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Phillip Torrone’s video feed

Many of you probably know Phil Torrone – the guy behind flashenabled.com, who always seems to have cooler toys than the rest of us. :-)

Phil’s built a video feed, optimized for NewsGator Media Center Edition. In Phil’s own words:

“…basically, with this, i have my own tv station.”

He works for Fallon Worldwide, which is the company behind BMW Films…which is good for us, because Phil’s feed even includes his favorite episode from the BMW Films series! Here’s a screen shot running in NewsGator Media Center edition:

Nice job, Phil! For any of you already running NewsGator Media Center edition, Phil’s feed can be added from the “Featured Feeds” section.

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NewsGator Media Center Edition

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.”

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