Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

Brad Feld wrote a couple of days ago about his first computer, which was an Apple II, with a whopping 64K of RAM. Kind of brought back memories for me…

The first computer I worked on was a Commodore VIC-20. How I did it I can’t remember…but when I was 14-ish years old (1983 or so?), I managed to score myself a job writing educational games for the VIC. I remember my mom would drop me off at this company’s office on the way to work, and I’d toil away filling up the 3.5K of RAM. These were the days when you wrote in BASIC, and when you ran out of memory you started to go through and change your variable names from “num” to “n” to save two bytes. :-)

As I recall, I made $100 for each game that was completed and accepted, which was to me a whopping boatload of money. I wrote three games over the summer, and bought a bike.

My next computer was a Texas Instruments 99/4A, which I believe had 16K of RAM. Oh, how I would torment my poor VIC-20 friends with my expansive wasteland of unused memory. Pretty sure I had to sell my Atari 2600 game console to afford this guy – but whew!

I remember writing a “Frogger” game on the TI-99/4A, which was (relatively speaking) a piece of cake because the TI had a sprite engine, which let you make an object and tell it to move (as opposed to calculating new positions on a timer). Wow…the world was my oyster with this baby.

After I wrote the frogger game (which probably took a week or two), I was so excited I wanted to send it to one of my friends, who also had a TI. Now, back in this day, the high-tech storage was cassette tapes, and it was actually a modulated audio recording that was written to tape. So I get this great idea…I called my friend, told him to hold his cassette microphone up to the phone receiver, and I’d play the recording to him over the phone. I mean, we don’t need no stinkin’ modem, right?

Well, wrong, as it turns out…that didn’t work nearly as well as I’d hoped. Like, not at all. Oh well, just had to beg mom to drive me over there with a copy of the tape. :-)

My next computer was a Franklin. I forget the model number, but it was an Apple II clone with 64K of RAM. And it had a floppy disk drive, which would hold something like 160K. Omigosh!

From there, I went to a 80286-based system from CompuAdd, and the rest is basically a history of Intel processors. But the fond memories – the ones that I look back on and see my future career starting from – are the ones of the VIC-20 and the TI-99/4A!

JPG Magazine has a fashion theme for issue 12 this year…I just submitted a photo I took of the lovely Salena. It was a brisk 35 degrees F that night in Denver, so I figure she’s earned the cover. :-) If you have a minute, click here to vote for it!

As you may have heard by now, we’re in beta with a product called NewsGator Social Sites that integrates NewsGator Enterprise Server very closely with Microsoft SharePoint. I’m going to blog about this quite a bit more in my upcoming product roadmap posts, but suffice it to say that the combination of these products makes an interesting Enterprise 2.0 application.

Anyway, I’m doing a webinar on Tuesday July 31, at 2:00pm EDT, with Rob Koplowitz of Forrester Research, and we’ll be showing actual product screenshots and talking quite a bit about Social Sites, and the combination of NGES and SharePoint.

You can see my fabulous mug :-) and sign up for the webinar here, if you’re so inclined!

Richard MacManus wrote an article on his blog called “Desktop RSS Readers Are (Nearly) Dead“, and went on to show some survey results and discuss some Feedburner data. But as the company who builds and sells the most popular desktop RSS clients in the world, I feel compelled to point out some flaws in his logic.

First, of his survey results, he says:

“Web-based Readers are up 7% and desktop Readers are down 6%.”

The real problem here, IMHO, was that users had to choose ONE option in the survey. I took the survey myself, and when faced with the question, I chose web-based reader…however, I had no way to indicate that I also use a desktop reader (FeedDemon) and a mobile reader (NewsGator Go!) quite often. I had to make a random choice between the three. In this world where people use multiple computers and devices, it’s hard to choose just one option.

And second, is this analysis of Feedburner data for Read/Write Web:

“…the top desktop RSS Reader in R/WW’s Feedburner stats is NetNewsWire. It’s ranked 12th overall, well behind Google Reader, Bloglines, Rojo and other browser-based Readers.”

This is also fatally flawed data. The most popular desktop clients (NetNewsWire on the Mac, and FeedDemon on Windows) will install by default in synchronized mode, which means they are getting their content from NewsGator Online, rather than directly from the source. When Feedburner reports statistics, it will NOT see any data at all for the desktop applications. The data is pulled into the NG/Online platform, and distributed through the NewsGator API’s to the clients…so Feedburner’s system is unaware of any of this.

Hope this clears things up. I think much of the the “drop” Richard is seeing in desktop client popularity is most likely due in large part to the way the new desktop clients retrieve data – and unfortunately that is very difficult to measure from the outside using tools like web log analysis or Feedburner.