Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

As I mentioned in my post last week about switching to a Mac, I’ve had a number of posts in the back of my mind, many of them observations that I’ve made since taking the plunge.

Today’s is about how the Mac seems to sell itself. And all of us Mac users tend to help. :-)

I’ve got two examples from my own recent experience (I’ve actually got more, but I’ll keep it down to two here).

I was over at my sister’s house for Thanksgiving, and her and her husband had a couple of friends over to join us. One of them brought along his Macbook Pro. My brother-in-law mentioned that he had just installed a new printer, and it was on his wireless LAN, but some configuration thing must have been messed up because none of his (windows) computers could see it.

His friend, just for grins, opened his Mac and went to the printer setup area, and within seconds it discovered the printer on the network, and installed it. He printed a web page…and while my brother-in-law was in the next room picking up the print, his friend called over to him “it looks like your cyan ink cartridge is low!”

Pretty funny…but the important point here is it just worked, without any CDs or complicate configuration. You know what he asked for for Christmas? Gift cards for the Apple store, so he can buy a new Mac.

The second example is a coworker, who has a nice video camera, and has played with some movie editing, but has not been able to successfully burn a video DVD from Windows (it always ends up with problems on his DVD player). He’s going home tonight with a DVD created with iDVD – and he said if it actually works, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll get a Mac for himself.

I think Apple is in the middle of a bit of a perfect storm at the moment. People I’ve talked to, while not necessarily disillusioned, are not generally impressed with (or excited about) Vista. It seems there is no “wow” factor making the average Joe want to take that step, unless he’s buying a new machine where it comes already installed. And even then, I’ve got some friends (Tom is one of them) who have new laptops with Vista, and are trying to figure out how to switch back to Windows XP. So while usage remains obviously strong, I think loyalty to Windows is waning.

At the same time, it seems that – especially at home – the Mac has plenty of software available for it. Mention just about any common task that we all do with our computers, and while there might not be as many Mac apps as Windows apps, there are typically enough to choose from. And I think this may be the case even in the office, but that will be the subject of another post.

And finally, the Mac has the reputation of being easy to use and trouble-free.

I think all of these things have come together to form quite a force. When I mention to people that perhaps they should consider a Mac, and they hear that even I use one :-), probably 80% of them at least consider it. And that, I believe, is a pretty big shift from where things were say 5 years ago.

As you might have already read this morning (depending on whether my post makes it out first!), NewsGator has closed a $12M financing round, bringing our total capital raised to $30M.

As the founder, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what we’ve accomplished, since that fateful day when I signed the series A paperwork. At that time, there were 2 full-time employees including me, NewsGator Inbox was called “NewsGator for Outlook” (wait, is NewsGator a company or a product?), and NewsGator Online was a subscription-only service (I like to think of it back then as the best kept secret in the industry).

And now? Yowsa. For starters, we’ve grown to about 75 amazing people, who have all really helped shape the company into what it is today (thanks guys!).

Our consumer product suite has grown, from not only NewsGator Inbox and NewsGator Online, but also with FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Go! for both Windows Mobile and Backberries, and quite a few other point products. And they all communicate with each other via the sync system we’ve put in place via NewsGator Online’s back-end platform (which processes around 7 million new articles per day).

We developed NewsGator Enterprise Server, our enterprise-class server system for aggregating and distributing content within the enterprise. It also implements our sync system, so all of our popular desktop and mobile clients also work in the enterprise. The server also integrates very tightly with Microsoft SharePoint, via our NewsGator Social Sites product. RSS is really the underlying plumbing for enterprise 2.0 – and NGES leads the market in providing this infrastructure. And this technology is real – over 100 of the Fortune 2000 have implemented NGES, and they’re thinking of new ways to use it every day.

And on top of that, using our core online platform, we’ve built up a part of our business called Syndication Services, providing content-related services to third parties such as media companies. We’re one of the leading widget platforms on the web, providing widgets to media companies and others that live on just about any site (including, of course, OpenSocial sites), delivering hundreds of millions of widget views every month. And our commercial web service APIs service tens of millions of API requests every day.

Whew! That sounds like a lot, from humble beginnings. :-) But the bottom line is, we want our consumer applications to be as ubiquitous as possible, while we continue to sell our software and services to businesses…and this new round of capital helps us expand our market and solidify our leadership.

So what’s next? Well, that’s a topic for another post…but rest assured, we’re working on some pretty amazing stuff (if I do say so myself!), and we’ve got a lot of news coming up soon. Stay tuned!

As some have noticed, and others have gloated about :-), I’ve been using a Mac (specifically a Macbook Pro) as my primary machine for about a month now. I’ve been a died-in-the-wool Windows guy every since Windows 3.0, and scoffed at all of the people playing with their silly Macs. Well, I guess they showed me, because now I’m using one. I’m even writing this post in MarsEdit.

Don’t get me wrong – I still like my friends in Redmond…but this experience has opened my eyes to some extent to how the “other half” lives.

I thought as a Windows user for so long, I might have a different perspective on the Mac…so I’m going to write a few posts (well, at least one – lol) talking about the whys and hows of my experience. So let’s get to it…and this post will be about “why oh why did I switch to the Mac?”

It all started with Windows Vista, actually. As a Windows guy, I was all excited when it was released, and installed it on my work laptop as soon as I could. Hmm…didn’t seem to get much faster, and I didn’t have a cool enough video card to run Aero, but hey, it was shiny and new. And the power management worked way better than XP ever did.

But then I got home, shrink-wrapped copies of Vista Ultimate in hand, and contemplated upgrading my home machine (which was running XP). This machine was the one I use for my photography, and it’s running Lightroom, Photoshop, and some other apps. Vista wasn’t such an obvious choice here, specifically for three reasons:

1. There were no Vista drivers yet for my Epson R2400, which I use for proofing and some print jobs. Eh? When is the last time a currently-available Epson printer didn’t have drivers for the latest version of Windows? Hmm.

2. The Spyder color calibration device I was using didn’t have Vista drivers either, and the manufacturer wasn’t planning to support it. I was less upset about this, because I was thinking about replacing this device anyway.

3. Color management on Vista – and this is the biggie – is apparently totally broken. From an article on Digital Outback Photo:

As you use Vista, you are occasionally interrupted by the OS as it confirms you have the admin-level privileges required or confirms certain actions. As a user-interface effect, Vista dims the screen slightly while offering the user a password dialog. Unfortunately, this dimming of the display clobbers the calibration curves in the graphics card and they are not replaced.

Are you kidding me? This is a total show-stopper. Combine this with the fact that it’s never 100% clear in Windows if your display profiles have been loaded (since only color-aware apps use them), and it seems it’s a total crapshoot.

Hmm. My photographer friends with Macs never seem to complain about their color management. Something about “I don’t know, I calibrate it and it just works.”

So I filed that away, and decided I’d just live with XP for a while.

But then I found myself with a shiny new iPhone, which I got for free at the Office 2.0 conference (and subsequently fell in love with, much to my surprise). Suddenly I started seeing Macs everywhere – conferences, coffee shops, you name it. I’d ask people about them – and every person I can remember said they loved it. I’d turn on my Vaio, and wait a couple of minutes for Vista to boot, and all the while admire their fancy Macbook Pro awaking nearly instantly from sleep (because I’ve rarely seen anyone actually turn off their Mac).

Then I stumbled across the page on the Apple web site where they have all of the Mac vs. PC ads, and (I can’t believe I actually did this) I watched the whole series of them. And you know what? They were fun. And Mac is clearly much cooler than PC.

So I thought, what the heck, and pulled the trigger. I knew lots of people who could help me if need be, and I figured worst case, we’ll use the machine for testing and such at NewsGator. So the evening Leopard was released, I cruised over to my local Apple store, and went home with a shiny new Macbook Pro, and a Leopard t-shirt.

And the moment I was sure I made the right decision? Right after I calibrated my monitor, created a profile, and selected it in OS X – and the whole screen updated immediately to reflect the new profile. Ahh…confidence.

Since then, I’ve observed a great many things…and I’ve got a few blog posts in the back of my mind about these:

• Macs sell themselves, and Mac users sell even more
• It’s totally possible (even advantageous) to use a Mac at work
• Mac apps are different
• Apple stores are different

I’m writing this in MarsEdit. I’ll preview it on the web in Safari. I’ll then get back to my email in Apple Mail. And you know what? I don’t miss Windows. At least not yet.

Sigh…I thought I could let this go, but I just can’t seem to. :-)

As I wrote a few days ago, Facebook’s Beacon collects data from third-party sites, and associates actions on those sites (such as buying something) with your profile data on Facebook. They’ve now allowed you to opt-out of having this information stored on Facebook’s servers, but the data is still sent to them regardless (even if you’re logged out).

Upon further reflection, I think MUCH more blame falls on the Beacon partners than I originally thought. The one Beacon partner that I’ve interacted with (that I know of) since all this has been happening is Kiva. I made a loan there, and the little Beacon popup came up and asked if I wanted to publish that to my Facebook feed. At the time I said yes, and silently wondered what exactly just happened.

What happened was this – Kiva sent, without my permission, data about a financial transaction I just made to Facebook. They sent it in a way that allowed Facebook cookies to be sent as well, which included my email address. Basically, without my permission, they told Facebook that Greg Reinacker just loaned money to Julia Vilca Chura.

That’s a dangerous precedent. And if we look at Kiva’s privacy policy, here’s the relevant piece (emphasis mine):

4) Kiva will not disclose your personally identifiable lending activity to any third party without consent. Kiva reserves the right to record and display anonymous lending activity on the Website and display the general regions where our lenders are located.

I think the transmission of my lending activity to facebook, knowingly with identifying information in the form of a facebook cookie, is pretty blatantly a violation of this privacy policy. Even if Facebook “promises not to store it” – I don’t care. I don’t want you to send it.

I don’t know for sure – but I’m guessing other Beacon partners don’t disclose this in their privacy policies either. If any of you have checked, please post a comment about it.

And by the way – I hate to pick on Kiva, because I think they’re accomplishing something that’s really great, and I encourage you to check them out. But I hope they will fix this in one way or another – and for the time being, I think that means disabling Beacon unless they have my explicit consent.

UPDATE: Liz from Kiva responded via email:

We appreciate the concerns that you mention below, so a short while ago, we suppressed the feature so that it is entirely opt-in on the thanks page. Now, after making a loan, a lender must actively click “Post” to display information about his/her loan to a Facebook Newsfeed. We do not share any loan data until the user clicks a Facebook link after lending, and unless the lender clicks the link, no loan data is shared. Please find a screenshot of the thanks page attached to this email.

As you note in our privacy policy, we assert that “Kiva will not disclose your personally identifiable lending activity to any third party without consent.” So, when we saw how the Facebook feature worked, and that it was opt-out rather than opt-in, we quickly suppressed the feature so that there was no possibility that Kiva was sharing lending activity without pro-active consent.

Perfect- kudos to Kiva for stepping up, realizing that Facebook’s “changes” have been wholly insufficient, and making the changes necessary to protect their users’ privacy. We can only hope that the other Beacon partners will do the same.

Over the last month or so, Facebook has been making changes to how Facebook Beacon works, seemingly in response to privacy concerns. But none of the changes have addressed one of the worst parts of the problem.

If this post from Dare Obasanjo doesn’t scare you, at least a little, then read it again:

When you read this you realize just how insidious the problem actually is. Facebook isn’t simply learning about every action taken by Facebook users on affiliate sites, it is learning about every action taken by every user of these affiliate sites regardless of whether they are Facebook users or not.

At first I assumed that the affiliates sites would call some sort of IsFacebookUser() API and then decide whether to send the action or not. Of course, this is still broken since the affiliate site has told Facebook that you are a user of the site, and depending on the return value of the hypothetical function the affiliate in turn learns that you are a Facebook user.

But no, it is actually worse than that. The affiliate sites are pretty much dumping their entire customer database into Facebook’s lap, FOR FREE and without their customers permission. What. The. Fuck.

If you’re not worried yet, then take a look at this post from the CA Security Advisor Research blog, showing a network trace of a site sending data to Facebook that could identify you being sent to Facebook even after you’ve opted out or logged out.

I usually run pretty fast and loose with this kind of thing; however, if I do business with a site, I expect that they will not share identifying data with another site without explicitly asking. Shame on you, Beacon partners.