About two weeks ago, Greg Reinacker wrote about NewsGator's past, present and future in two blog posts entitled NewsGator platform roadmap - Part I (a look back) and NewsGator platform roadmap - Part II (a look forward). The blog posts are a good look at the achievements of a company that has gone from a one-man shop building an RSS reading plugin for Outlook into being the dominant syndication platform company on almost any platform from Windows & Mac to the Web & mobile phones. If you are interested in XML syndication, then Greg's posts are bookmark-worthy since they describe the future plans of a company that probably has the best minds building RSS/Atom applications working there today. Below are some excerpts from his posts in my areas of interest
NewsGator Online As I said 16 months ago, the proposed feature list is long and distinguished - and it still is. There is so much to do here...some of the short-term planned additions range from more interactive feed discovery mechanisms (based on the larger community of users and their subscriptions), to completely different user interface paradigms (where a user could potentially select from different options, each catering to a different kind of user). A larger initiative is around the whole paradigm. Techies aside, users don't want to think about feeds, and subscriptions, and searching for content...Given all that, we're really rethinking the way we present information to the user, and the way users discover new information. We're designing ways for people to participate in a larger community if they wish, and get more value out of the content they consume, at the point they discover it. While we all have our own set of feeds, and we all participate to some extent in the larger ecosystem, there is a lot of potential in linking people with similar interests to each other. Some users will continue to use our system as they always have - and others will use it in completely different ways. We're testing a couple of approaches on this right now - I think it's truly a game-changer.NewsGator Inbox, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire As I mentioned before, the enthusiasm around these products has continued to grow - people obviously see the value in a rich, synchronized, offline-capable user experience for consuming content. Moving forward, online integration will get tighter, and more complete - ranging from the low hanging fruit like FeedDemon "News Bins" becoming Clippings (and thus synchronize with the entire platform), to more involved features like analytics-related features (recommendations, interest-based surfacing, etc.) and community-related features....NewsGator core platform This is the heart of our entire product line (with the exception of NewsGator Enterprise Server). Moving forward, we're investing a lot in the platform. We're building out more support for deep analytics (which we can use to deliver different kinds of user experience), and building out a much deeper metadata engine (which means if a client retrieves content from our system, they'll get much richer data than they otherwise would). We'll have other ways to "slice" our data to get what you need, without having to subscribe to hundreds of feeds. The API has been very successful, and we process millions of API calls per day from client applications, web services, and private label clients. This traffic actually makes up a large percentage of our overall system traffic - which I think is a testament to the popularity and utility of the API. Moving forward here, we're obviously very committed to the API story, and we'll continue to enhance it as we add platform capabilities.
NewsGator Online
As I said 16 months ago, the proposed feature list is long and distinguished - and it still is. There is so much to do here...some of the short-term planned additions range from more interactive feed discovery mechanisms (based on the larger community of users and their subscriptions), to completely different user interface paradigms (where a user could potentially select from different options, each catering to a different kind of user).
A larger initiative is around the whole paradigm. Techies aside, users don't want to think about feeds, and subscriptions, and searching for content...Given all that, we're really rethinking the way we present information to the user, and the way users discover new information. We're designing ways for people to participate in a larger community if they wish, and get more value out of the content they consume, at the point they discover it. While we all have our own set of feeds, and we all participate to some extent in the larger ecosystem, there is a lot of potential in linking people with similar interests to each other. Some users will continue to use our system as they always have - and others will use it in completely different ways. We're testing a couple of approaches on this right now - I think it's truly a game-changer.
NewsGator Inbox, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire
As I mentioned before, the enthusiasm around these products has continued to grow - people obviously see the value in a rich, synchronized, offline-capable user experience for consuming content. Moving forward, online integration will get tighter, and more complete - ranging from the low hanging fruit like FeedDemon "News Bins" becoming Clippings (and thus synchronize with the entire platform), to more involved features like analytics-related features (recommendations, interest-based surfacing, etc.) and community-related features....NewsGator core platform
This is the heart of our entire product line (with the exception of NewsGator Enterprise Server). Moving forward, we're investing a lot in the platform. We're building out more support for deep analytics (which we can use to deliver different kinds of user experience), and building out a much deeper metadata engine (which means if a client retrieves content from our system, they'll get much richer data than they otherwise would). We'll have other ways to "slice" our data to get what you need, without having to subscribe to hundreds of feeds.
The API has been very successful, and we process millions of API calls per day from client applications, web services, and private label clients. This traffic actually makes up a large percentage of our overall system traffic - which I think is a testament to the popularity and utility of the API. Moving forward here, we're obviously very committed to the API story, and we'll continue to enhance it as we add platform capabilities.
There's lots of good stuff here. The first thing that pops out at me is that while a bunch of startups these days tend to proclaim the death of desktop software, NewsGator is actually seeing the best of both worlds and improving the quality of the desktop experience by harnessing a Web-based platform. It's not Web-based software replacing desktop software, it's desktop software becoming better by working in tandem with APIs and applications on the Web. When Ray Ozzie talks about "live software", NewsGator is the company that leaps most readily to my mind.
I like the idea of making discovery of new content more of a social experience. It'd be interesting to see what would happen if NewsGator Online had a del.icio.us-inspired interface for browsing and subscribing to people's feeds. I notice that Gordon Weakliem who works on the NewsGator API recently wrote a post entitled Needles in Haystacks where he talks about serendipitous discovery of new websites by browsing bookmarks of people with similar interests to him in del.icio.us. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before NewsGator adds these features to their platform.
I also like the idea of exposing richer metadata in the NewsGator API especially if it relates to the social features that they plan to unveil in the next couple of months. Unfortunately, I've never been able to get the NewsGator API to work quite right with RSS Bandit but I'll be revisiting that code later in the summer.