Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

For the most part, I’m in this business to pay the bills. Not that I don’t love it — I do – but as I have said before, there are other things I’d love to do too, like spend more time racing cars. But every now and then, you hear something very cool:

The faster we can figure that out, and enable our partners to build cool stuff, the better off we’ll both be. That’s why I like .NET so much. It helps our partners build cool stuff (like the NewsGator news aggregator that has completely changed my life). [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Building software that changes people’s lives - that’s something I’m excited about. Thanks, Robert. I’m glad you like it. :-)

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.

I will be at the DEMO conference next week, participating in a panel about blogging and syndication. Also participating will be Mena Trott of Six Apart, Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords, and Robert Scoble of Microsoft.

John Patrick, who will be moderating the panel, wrote a preview of the panel here.

If you’re going to be at the conference, be sure to say hello!

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.

Does anyone have any good examples of recent major news events that have been broken by bloggers before the news media picked up the stories?

A few recent articles of note about NewsGator and NewsGator Online Services:

Software keeps track of Weblog, news-site updates - Mike Langberg, San Jose Mercury News

RSS is the New News - Rafe Needleman, AlwaysOn

IDG’s InfoWorld Supports NewsGator’s RSS Subscription Synchronization System with Targeted Content - IDG press release