NewsGator POP Edition

Continuing in the series of posts describing NewsGator 2.0 and NewsGator Online Services:

One of the most common question we get is some variant of:

Does NewsGator work with Entourage? Outlook Express? Eudora? Lotus Notes?
 
I love the idea of reading RSS feeds in my email client, but I hate Outlook. Do you have a version for [insert mail client here]?

Up to now, the answer has been no…but with POP Edition, part of NewsGator Online Services, we now have a solution.

POP Edition works with any POP3 email client, which is just about every email client out there. You simply add a new email account to your client, point it to the NGOS server, and you can then retrieve your content as mail messages into your client.

It’s configurable, so you can make decisions about how the message will be formatted, and where the feed name will show up. We do this to make sure no matter what email client you’re using, you’ll be able to sort and group your messages the way you want, and build rules to sort them into folders if you like.

And of course, it works with the NGOS synchronization system…so your subscriptions follow you wherever you go, and you never have to read the same thing twice. And if you change settings on your client like whether to leave messages on the server, or delete them, those settings are respected by the sync system – so it will just do the right thing, as you would expect.

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NewsGator Web Edition

Uh oh, I’m letting down on the job…it’s already Wednesday, and I have a lot more to tell you about. :-)

NewsGator Web Edition, part of the NewsGator Online Services suite, is a web-based content aggregator which runs in a web browser.

Now there are plenty of other web-based aggregators out there…why do we need another one? A couple of reasons.

First, it works with the NGOS synchronization system (more info). So you can read posts at home with Web Edition, and when you get to the office and download posts with NewsGator for Outlook, you won’t have to read the same content. Unless you want to. And remember the sync system works with POP Edition and Mobile Edition too – more to come on that. Combine that with an online subscription management system, which even allows you to expose a subset of your subscriptions publicly as OPML, and we’re onto something here.

Second, it’s tightly integrated into the rest of the NGOS features – including custom search feeds and premium content…

Available January 19 at http://services.newsgator.com.

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Atom feeds and well-formed XML

Nick and Brent (here and here) have announced that FeedDemon and NetNewsWire will have strict parsing for Atom feeds, meaning non-well-formed feeds will not parse in those products. I totally understand their position, and sympathize with their arguments. However…

NewsGator 2.0, and all of the NewsGator editions being shipped as part of NewsGator Online Services on January 19, will parse Atom feeds using a very similar parser to that used for RSS; that means that most “questionable” feeds (of which there are a LOT) will parse ok.

The vast majority of our customers don’t care about well-formed XML – they care about getting information. Our tools are designed to make that happen.

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NewsGator Synchronization

As promised, here is the first in a series of posts describing NewsGator 2.0 and NewsGator Online Services.

NewsGator 2.0, and NewsGator Online Services (NGOS) provide synchronization capability for your subscriptions. The basic premise – your subscriptions follow you wherever you go, and you never have to read the same thing twice. There are three classes of information that is synchronized:

  • Subscriptions – so you can add/delete your subscriptions in one place, and the changes will be reflected on other machines.
     
  • Read/unread information – if you download an item on one machine, you won’t see that item anywhere else (unless you want to).
     
  • Which machines have which subscriptions – if you use NewsGator for Outlook at home and at work, you may want separate (but overlapping) subscriptions in each place. For example, you may have feeds at work that you can’t access at home, since they’re behind your corporate firewall.  NGOS allows you to specify where each subscription should apply, and just “does the right thing” when it’s time to sync.
The sync system is very easy to use – you just enable the synchronization option, and a wizard walks you through a very short process to set up the initial sync. After the initial sync, the system is completely automatic – you don’t have to do anything, or even think about it. It just works.
 
 
To save bandwidth, only differences are synchronized on each automatic sync. This ensures great performance, even on low bandwidth connections.
 
You can even (optionally) expose your OPML file publicly. My blogroll on the right side of my weblog is generated automatically using my public OPML file. You can specify which subscriptions should be exposed, and can expose as many OPML files as you like, with different sets of subscriptions.
 
Beyond NewsGator for Outlook, the sync system works with all NewsGator editions, including Web Edition, POP Edition, and Mobile Edition. If you’re away from the office, you can use mobile edition to read a few posts…or read everything on web edition from a public computer.
 
The API’s used for the sync system will be available for any interesting 3rd parties who are interested in making their applications work with our system.
 
More to come over the rest of the week!
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Confessions of a Napster 2.0 user

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using Napster 2.0 (formerly Pressplay) for about 8 months or so. Despite a couple of minor glitches, overall, it’s been a very positive experience. I’m on the $9.95/mo plan. A few observations from continued use:

  • First, I’m at my desk probably 10 hours/day on average, and I’m streaming content most of this time. I listen to a lot more music now than I ever did. And I listen to a much wider variety of artists now.
     
  • When I read about some new music, or a friend tells me about some new artist, I can just search for them on Napster and listen to them instantly. There have been only a couple of times when I couldn’t find what I wanted; and the artists I couldn’t find don’t seem to be available on any online service that I’ve seen. Examples – Madonna and LeAnn Rimes.
     
  • When I find something I really like, and I’m constantly listening to it, I go buy the CD rather than buying the music through the service. Then I can play it in the car, in my disconnected home stereo, and rip it to my computer to listen to it there. This is good for the label, I suppose, but I wonder what it does to the margins for Napster. I’m guessing at $0.99/track, there is very little margin there anyway…so hopefully they’re making a reasonable profit from the monthly fee when I’m constantly streaming.
     
  • Most songs on Napster have the full song available for streaming, but a few songs/artists only have 30-second previews. I’ve found that if an entire album is only previews, I won’t listen to it…but one of my favorites has all full songs, except for one preview-only song. Annoying, but I hate to admit it’s actually a good incentive to buy the CD. I want to hear the rest of that song! :-)
     
  • I really want a 10 foot interface for this stuff that I could run on a Media Center PC, which I have heard rumors actually does exist. I guess now all I need is that Media Center PC!
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PR on the Cheap

Freelance writer Ron Miller wrote an article featuring NewsGator in his latest Home Base column in Network World Fusion, titled PR on the Cheap. From Ron’s weblog:

I describe how small companies who can’t afford to hire a PR firm or a clipping service, can use a news aggregator such as NewsGator to help monitor the Web and blogs for information about their company or markets.

Great stuff!

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Aggregators that automatically download web pages

This is a pretty common request for NewsGator:

Perhaps I’m missing something but I think that actually having a reader go out and retrieve the referenced news web page along with the summary feed is much more valuable…  Reading hundreds of news headlines is less useful when you are travelling, offline, etc.  as there is no way to get the actual content.

Wouldn’t it be possible to add a feature that retrieves the referenced URL?

[NewsGator Forums]

Currently, NewsGator shows whatever is in the feed – nothing more, nothing less. If the feed contains full content, that what will be shown; if the feed contains only excerpts, that’s what will be shown. In essense, we show whatever the publisher intended.

There are other tools that will go out and retrieve the contents of the web site at the link specified in the RSS item automatically at retrieval time (as opposed to viewing time), so it can be read offline, which is what’s essentially being asked for above.

If the feed publisher really intended you to see the complete web page inside your aggregation tool, they could put the complete content inside the feed…then we would show that.  But often times they don’t, obviously.

So we’re caught between doing what the publisher wants (driving a click-through), or doing what the user says they want (scrape the page).  It’s a tough call – we don’t want to upset the publishers, as they’re the ones providing the content…

There are also a number of downsides with a scraping mechanism.  It uses a sizable amount of bandwidth to retrieve all of these pages.  You may not even be interested in some of the pages, so they were retrieved for nothing, costing the publisher additional bandwidth.  Advertising stats on the publisher side will be skewed.  It’s a tough call.

Any comments?

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EContent Top 100 – NewsGator Technologies

NewsGator Technologies has been listed in the EContent Magazine Top 100 list for 2003! From the magazine:

“Welcome to the third annual EContent 100 – our list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry.”

So far, this is only in the print magazine, not yet online…I’ll add a link to this post when it hits their web site.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our staff, contractors, partners, and customers for making this possible. And if you think 2003 was good, wait until you see what we’re going to ship in 2004. :-)

Update: 2003 EContent Top 100 now online

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