Alan Kleymeyer has a post entitled NewsGator Online where he writes

I've switched my online news aggregator from Bloglines to Newsgator.  First, I wanted to try it out and compare it to Bloglines.  I like the interface better, especially in how you mark things as read.  I've swithched for good.  I mainly switched so that I can continue using RSS Bandit and get the benefit of syncing between it and an online news aggregator (supported in latest RSS Bandit 1.3.0.38 release)

Alan's post describes exactly why creating APIs for your online service and treating it as a Web platform and not just a web site is important. What would you rather use, a web-based aggregator which provides limited integration with a few desktop aggregators (i.e.Bloglines) OR a web-based aggregator which provides full integration with a variety of free and payware aggregators including RSS Bandit, NetNewsWire and FeedDemon? Building out a Web platform is about giving users choice which is what the NewsGator guys have done by providing the NewsGator API.

The canonical example of the power of Web APIs and Web platforms is RSS. Providing an RSS feed liberates your readers from the limitations of using one application (the Web browser) and one user interface (your HTML website) to view your content. They can consume it on their own terms using the applications that best fit their needs. Blogging wouldn't be as popular as it is today if not for this most fundamental of web services.

The topic of my ThinkWeek paper was turning Web sites into Web platforms and I was hoping to get to give a presentation about it at next year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference but it got rejected. I guess I'll just have to keep shopping it around. Perhaps I can get it into Gnomedex or Mix '06. :)


 

Thursday, 15 December 2005 20:29:08 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Hey Dare,

I agree with the power of a Web platform and concur on the sweetness of the NewsGator Online API. I recently used the NewsGator Online API to build a mobile newsreader (http://smartfeed.org/2005/12/beta-testers-wanted.html). Greg and company are doing some pretty cool stuff down the road from me in Denver!

My biggest RSS problem is that I have way too much stuff to wade through. With my mobile news reader, I can at least mark irrelevant posts as read from my MS Smartphone, and when I get back to my desktop and fire up NewsGator Online all the fluff is gone and I can dig into the good stuff!

Dare, thanks for all your interesting posts!

-kevin, author smartFeed
Friday, 16 December 2005 07:33:34 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Dare, do consider submitting your paper to XTech 2006. Sounds highly on-topic to me.

http://xtech.org/2006/call.asp

-- Edd, XTech chair
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