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Enterprise RSS

Enterprise 2.0 Perspectives from NewsGator

NewsGator's 2.5 Billion RSS ArticlesMarch 14

Microsoft published a case study about our use of SQL Server 2008. It's a pretty good summary of our how much "stuff" we have to manage.

NewsGator makes life easier for individuals and companies by aggregating Really Simple Syndication (RSS) data feeds from across the Web to provide users with customized content delivery, enabling everyone to essentially create their own electronic newspaper. The company, which also provides Software as a Service to more than 50 media outlets including CNN and USA Today, stores some 2.5 billion RSS articles totalling about 4 terabytes on clustered databases running Microsoft® SQL Server® database Software. NewsGator is upgrading its database infrastructure to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) running on the Windows Server® 2008 for 64-Bit Systems operating system to take advantage of a number of new features, including enhanced Database Mirroring for high availability, Backup Compression to reduce storage needs, and Resource Governor for allocating processing resources.

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Activity Scoring in NewsGator OnlineFebruary 21

The Great from the Many

In January, when we made all of our client readers available for free, we said we were collecting usage data to make the experience better for all users. Today, we released a feature based on that data.

At the top of the NewsGator Online reader, you’ll see a “Sort” option. When you click it, you’ll see the “Sort By Activity” option. If you choose that, you’ll see something like the display below when you click on a feed or folder.

Your unread posts will be sorted based on total user activity in NewsGator’s online reader, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Inbox, and Go!. The green bar gives a graphical view of the total activity based on a scale much like the decibel system. In a sense, you can think of this as the “noise level” for the post. Posts that completely fill up the green bar are generating a lot of “noise”.

Behind the scenes, millions of rows of activity data are run through an algorithm to produce this score and scale it to this view. Actions like clipping a post or emailing it to a friend affect the score more than just clicking the title link. We learned a lot about scoring based on our experience with our NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) product.

Attention Data: Content vs. UserFebruary 11

Much has been made about our recent move to make our RSS client applications free to users. To recap, last month we removed all license fees for our client applications (NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, Go mobile apps, our online reader, and Outlook plugin), and in exchange we eliminated telephone support and enabled a data syncing process between the apps and our online service that went beyond our subscription data to what we refer to as "attention data".

The telephone support bit of this was a no-brainer, we rarely had someone call for support; most of our users go to the online forums for help. So in effect, removing telephone support was more symbolic than anything else as the actual impact on resource allocation was pretty minimal.

The attention data topic is considerably more interesting to cover. While most commenters have adopted a wait-and-see approach, some have raised some good questions about what we are doing with that data, which in aggregate totals millions of individual line items each day. Our network datacenter now covers 2.1 million feeds that poll at least hourly, collecting well over 7 million new items of content each day.

We archive this content as well, but it's

comScore widget matrix numbers are innacurateFebruary 4

Techcrunch recently published a post about “The Widget Kings” which promoted the comScore widget matrix as a symbol of rank among widget manufacturers. We did a little research on the accuracy of these numbers – to make a long story short; we found the numbers entirely inaccurate and incomplete as ranking of widget vendors.

This is not a new perspective, both GigaOm and Jeff Jarvis posted about this back in June 2007 when the comScore list was first released.

It’s difficult enough to track traffic accurately on the internet, much less widgets, so we weren't surprised to see some inconsistencies; it is to be expected when reports like these are first generated. But when the numbers are deceptive and wrong, the report loses all credibility as an independent ranking of widget vendors.

Let’s compare the list in April from the report just released in November. For our analysis, we looked into the changes in the standings and tried to validate their statistics with Compete and Alexa. While we appreciate that comScore, Compete and Alexa don't all track the same way, we were hoping these sites could at least get a sense of whether these other sites might show traffic increasing or decreasing over th

If SuperPoke is the crack cocaine of Facebook, then perhaps Widgets are a mild narcoticJanuary 19

There’s been a lot of talk of late about “viral loops” (see Jeff Nolan or Andrew Chen), how they define the development of social applications and how they are the secret sauce of social networks. Without going into significant detail on the topic, the basic premise is this: viral loops will help your application get distributed by encouraging you to interact with your friends. Most of the Facebook applications are solely focused around this premise, (hence the SuperPoke reference in the title).

The parallel on the widget front is an "interaction loop", these are the hooks built in widgets that encourage interaction - by responding to content or sharing with others. The main difference between 'interaction' and 'viral' loops- not all interactions are viral, some interactions simply benefit the user through personalization or community interaction. Widgets differ slightly from social applications in that the end goal isn't always to get the user to send to a friend, widgets are typically used to provide a service to the end user, such as presenting personalized information or content.

So let’s take a look at some of the ways interaction loops are put together.

This is a simple video widget from NewsGator that plays videos and shows