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Enterprise RSS

Enterprise 2.0 Perspectives from NewsGator


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.


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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. (NGE


Attention Data: Content vs. UserFebruary 12

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

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 comm

Why Use a Desktop Feed ReaderJanuary 11

I was going to write a quick post about why web-based readers don't work very well within the enterprise, then I noticed that Nick already wrote that.

  1. Most web-based readers (NewsGator's being an exception) can't subscribe to secure feeds. I don't know about you, but that's a show-stopper for me - I have a number of password-protected feeds that I absolutely have to keep track of.
  2. Web-based readers can't access "behind-the-firewall" feeds. For example, we have an internal server which runs FogBugz, and I'm subscribed to several FogBugz feeds which alert me to problem reports and inquiries regarding my software. I can't add these critically important feeds to a web-based reader.
  3. Most web-based readers offer no offline support, and even when they do, offline reading is still far better in FeedDemon (this screencast shows why). FeedDemon doesn't just download your articles so you can read them offline - it can also prefetch the images they contain and the pages they link to, enabling you to browse the web without an Internet connection. Your web-based reader can't do that. This is one of those features that you don't think you'll need - until you do.
  4. Many desktop readers are full-fledged web browsers, complete with access to your favorites, tabbed browsing, etc. In fact, FeedDemon is my web browser - I ra
NewsGator Makes Client Apps FreeJanuary 9

NewsGator announced today the general availability of NetNewsWire 3.1, FeedDemon 2.6, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. The public beta of NewsGator Inbox 3.0 also began today. The award-winning products for PC (FeedDemon), Mac (NetNewsWire), Microsoft Outlook (Inbox), and mobile (NewsGator Go!) deliver a best-of-breed RSS reading experience that synchronizes through NewsGator’s online platform. All of the new product versions deliver a better user experience with the inclusion of significant performance, usability, and relevance enhancements.

NewsGator also announced that all of its client RSS reader products are now available free of charge and include free synchronization and other services. Users can now enjoy the great features and performance of all the web and desktop readers as well as free mobile options for iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry (powered by FreeRange) all synchronized to provide the same view of their RSS content no matter where they read. Enterprise customers will continue to enjoy the extended value of having all these clients synchronize with NewsGator Enterprise Server. The combination of innovation in client reader featu