December 27, 2005
@ 07:15 PM

About a month ago we released the first cut of the Nightcrawler edition of RSS Bandit and promised that there'd be a bug fix release within a month. So exactly 30 days and about 100,000 downloads later, we're shipping the bug fix version of the Nightcrawler release.

Download the installer from here. Differences between v1.3.0.38 and v1.3.0.42 below.

Translations

  • This release is available in the following languages; German, English, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Polish, Serbian, Russian, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, and Turkish.

Installer

  • The application can now be installed on computers that only have v2.0 of the .NET Framework available.

  • A mini-application for editing the keyboard shortcuts used by the RSS Bandit has now been added. To locate the application, look in the RSS Bandit application folder which is usually "C:\Program Files\RssBandit" for the application named ShortcutsEditor.exe

Feeds

  • Fixed issue where the subscription wizard picks the first feed found on a web page in auto-discovery mode instead of displaying the list of feeds found so users can choose which feed to add to their subscriptions.

  • Feed autodiscovery now uses the Firefox icon () which will also be used by IE 7, Outlook 12 and FeedDemon for indicating when feeds have been found on a web page within RSS Bandit.

  • The '+' that indicates that inline comments are available for a post now controlled by the Tools->Options->Display->Display Related Items as discussion threads checkbox. Note that this feature is now off by default.

  • Fixed issue that feed validation/autodiscovery/search in subscription wizard could not be cancelled

  • Fixed problems with processing titles in Atom feeds containing markup characters. We now pass all of Phil Ringnalda's Atom title test cases. .

  • Fixed issue where the title of first post in the feed is used as the feed title in some RSS 1.0 feeds..

  • Fixed issue where some comments aren't shown inline for some feeds that support <wfw:commentRss>

  • Fixed issue where the blog post is repeated as the first comment in some feeds that support <wfw:commentRss>.

Newsgroups

  • Added ability to create new posts in a newsgroup.
  • Subscribing to a newsgroup no longer asks for username and password per subscription since this information is specified when the news server was first added.

  • Subscribing to multiple newsgroups at once now supported.

  • Fixed bug where subscribing to newsgroups via Tools->Newsgroups results in 'Input string was not in a correct format' error on attempting to download posts from the newsgroup.

  • Fixed issue where downloading messages from newsgroups times out. This was fixed by setting the maximum number of items to download to 1000.

  • Fixed issue where subscribing to password protected newsgroups results in "Credentials property not an instance of NetworkCredential" error.

Synchronization with NewsGator Online

  • Fixed issue where when downloading feedlist from NewsgatorOnline the following error occurs; "Feedlist download failed with error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object".

  • Fixed issue that downloading feedlists from Newsgator Online never stops


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

December 27, 2005
@ 05:40 PM

Niall Kennedy has a blog post entitled Exclusive: Google to offer feed API where he reveals

Google plans to offer a feed reader API to allow third-party developers to build new views of feed data on top of Google's backend. The new APIs will include synchronization, feed-level and item-level tagging, per-item read and unread status, as well as rich media enclosure and metadata handling. Google Reader PM Jason Shellen and engineer Chris Wetherell both confirmed Google's plans after I posted my reverse-engineering analysis of the Google Reader backend.

The new APIs will allow aggregator developers to build new views and interactions on top of Google's data. Google currently has at least two additional Google Reader views running on current development builds.

Google may offer public access to the feed API as early as next month. Shellen said the team wants to nail a few more bugs before publicly making the service available to the world.
...
Google's new offering is direct competition to NewsGator's synchronization APIs but are easier to code against (no SOAP required). Google currently does not have the same reach across devices as NewsGator but an easy-to-use API from the guys who brought you the Blogger API and "Blog This!" might really shake up the feed aggregator ecosystem.

As someone who's been thinking about synchronization between RSS readers for a few years I definitely see this as a welcome development. The Bloglines sync API is too limited in its functionality to be useful while the NewsGator API is both complex and designed with too many assumptions to be widely usable. However, unlike Niall, I blame the complexity of the NewsGator API on the data model and expected data flow than on whether it uses SOAP versus Plain Old XML (POX) as the wire format.

Once the Google Reader API ships, I'll definitely investigate the feasibility of adding support for it to the Jubilee release of RSS Bandit.


 

December 22, 2005
@ 08:05 AM

Finding myself with a few hours to kill this evening, I decided to update my Seattle Movie Finder mashup which provides information on show times for movies currently playing in the Seattle area. The update was to use the new map control that is being used by Windows Live Local instead of the old Virtual Earth map control.

So far there isn't a lot of accurate information out there for working with the new control. The best guide I found was the article Creating Your First Virtual Earth v2 Page, almost every other article or reference document seems to be outdated. As usual Chandu Thota was a fountain of wisdom when it came to getting info about the API as was Chris Pendleton.

Note: This version works in Internet Explorer. I've pinged the Windows Live Local folks to complain about Firefox support so I expect it should be forthcoming since they seemed aware of the problem.

It works in Firefox and Internet Explorer.


 

Categories: Windows Live

The Reuters article AOL, Google ad pact to include video, instant msgs states

America Online said Google had agreed to invest $1 billion to take a 5 percent stake in AOL, as part of an enhanced pact where Google will move beyond text-based advertising to allow AOL to sell graphical ads to Google's fast-growing ad network.

The stake effectively values AOL at $20 billion, a key benchmark should Time Warner elect to spinoff or sell a part of its Internet unit in response to dissident shareholder Carl Icahn's proxy campaign to break up the company.

Terms of the deal call for AOL to make more of its Web sites searchable via Google search, including a plans to feature AOL's premium video services within Google Video, a way of searching for Web-based video programming.

They also said they had agreed, under certain unspecified conditions, to allow users of Google's recently introduced instant messaging system Google Talk to communicate with users of AOL's market-leading AIM instant messaging service.

This is a very interesting development when combined with the recent release of the Libjingle library which allows developers to use the Google Talk API. Does this mean it'll soon be possible for any developer who grabs Libjingle off of SourceForge to be able to integrate the ability to instant message with any AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) into their applications free of charge? That is definitely game changing. I haven't looked at Libjingle [for obvious reasons] but I am interested in comments on whether my analysis is on the mark or not from people who've tried it.

I'll definitely be watching the Google Talk blog and Joe Beda's blog to keep on top of the developments in this space. Interesting stuff indeed. Perhaps I'll soon be able to integrate chatting with your AIM buddies into RSS Bandit ?


 

Categories: Web Development

December 21, 2005
@ 01:00 AM

I just found out about Yahoo! Open Shortcuts. This is SICK!!!. Yahoo! has done it again. The excerpt below is taken from the FAQ

  1. How do I use it?
  2. Do you have some shortcuts that are ready to use?
  3. How do I create my own?
  4. How do I manage my Open Shortcuts?
  5. Is there search meta word trigger?
  6. Can I name my shortcut the same name as a default shortcut?
  7. I've got feedback about Yahoo! Open Shortcuts. Who do I tell?
  1. How do I use it?

    Type an ! (exclamation point) followed by the name of the shortcut in the Yahoo! Search box.

    !shortcut_name

    Examples:

    !my to navigate to "http://my.yahoo.com"
    !wsf to search "weather san francisco" on Yahoo!

    For shortcuts that search favorite sites or start an Internet application, you can also type optional term(s) after the shortcut name.

    !shortcut_name term(s)

    Examples:

    !ebay lamps to search for "lamps" on Ebay
    !mail bill@yahoo.com to send email to "bill@yahoo.com"


  2. Do you have some shortcuts that are ready to use?

    These popular shortcuts are available for immediate use:


    Navigation
    !clist http://www.craigslist.org/
    !my http://my.yahoo.com/
    !mysp http://www.myspace.com/
     
    Search
    !amazon http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search?mode=blended&keyword=%s
    !audio http://audio.search.yahoo.com/search/audio?p=%s
    !ebay http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle=%s
    !flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/%s/
    !image http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=%s
    !mw http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/ourresults?p=%s
    !news http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/search?p=%s
    !php http://www.php.net/%s
    !shop http://search.shopping.yahoo.com/search?cop=mss&p=%s
    !video http://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?p=%s
    !wiki http://en.wikipedia.org?search=%s
     
    Application
    !note http://notepad.yahoo.com/?v=161&DESC=%s
    !mail http://compose.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?login=1&To=%s
  3. How do I create my personal shortcuts?

    To create a navigational shortcut, use the keyword: !set with your shortcut name and destination URL.

    !set shortcut_name URL

    Example:

    To create a shortcut named "ff" to go to Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football,
    Type: !set ff http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/f2

    To create a common search shortcut, use the keyword: !set with your shortcut name and the query.

    !set shortcut_name query

    Example:

    To create a shortcut named "watx" to search Yahoo! for "weather austin texas",
    Type: !set watx weather austin texas


    To create a shortcut that searches a favorite site or starts an Internet application, use the keyword: !set with your shortcut name and the destination URL. Within the URL, substitute the query term(s) with the "%s" placeholder.

    !set shortcut_name URL_%s

    Example:

    To create a shortcut named "yf" to search stock quotes on Yahoo! Finance,
    Type: !set yf http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%s

This is extremely useful. I've been wanting a short cut for searching Wikipedia on popular search engines for quite a while. Just for this feature alone I can see my usage other search engines dropping. 


 

Categories: Web Development

We were planning to ship a bugfix release of RSS Bandit before Christmas which fixed all the major issues reported in the recently Nightcrawler edition of RSS Bandit.

Unfortunately, it seems that either due to complexity or buginess I simply can't get the NewsGator API to perform the straightforward task of marking something as read in NewsGator Online which was viewed in RSS Bandit. I spent all of yesterday afternoon plus a couple of hours this morning working on it and I've finally given up. This feature simply won't work in the bugfix release shipping later this week. Maybe I'll have better luck when we ship the Jubilee release.

To make myself feel better, I'll work on fixing some of the Atom parsing bugs reported by Phil Ringnalda and the issues with password protected newsgroups. Nothing like having your self-worth defined by how many bugs you close in a database on SourceForge.

Update: So not only have I already fixed the newsgroup issues and the problems with parsing Atom feeds pointed out by Phil Ringnalda but I just got pinged by Gordon Weakliem who is the developer of the NewsGator API. Perhaps my Christmas can be salvaged after all.


 

I've seen a number of interesting posts today in response to the news that Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer for the Mac ths year. The best posts have been from people who used to work on the product.

Jorg Brown has a comment on Slashdot entitled I was on the MacIE 6 team when it got canned... which contains the following excerpt

MacIE had one of the strangest and saddest histories I've seen, of any product.

MacIE 5 was an awesome release, critically aclaimed and everything, with a good development team and a strong testing team, that included daily performance measurement.

And yet, almost immediately after 5.0 was released, the MacIE team was redeployed to work on a set-top DVR box. The notion at the time was that the team would continue to do MacIE work in their spare time, since IE 5 was the leader among Mac browsers and no longer needed a full-time team.

The problem with that notion was that WebTV, the team's new bosses, had no reason to actually schedule any time for real IE work. So later, when that particular set-top box got cancelled, the IE team got redployed for other WebTV work, and since this was now out of MacBU's control, nothing could really be done.

3 or 4 years went by before enough people in the Mac division wanted to resume work on IE, and when it looked like we might actually need the technology, as a base for MSN-for-Mac, the IE 6 team was formed. It got a firm OS X-only foundation, a new even more complient browser base, and then suddenly it became apparent that Apple was doing their own browser, because, well, there were lots of small clues, but the big clues was that Apple had started calling the old Mac IE team offering them jobs.

By that time the Mac division had formally committed to MSN-for-Mac-OSX, so it's not like we were completely going to stop work. But a meeting was held internally, the outcome of which was that it didn't make sense to build our own browser if Apple was going to bundle one, because the marketshare and mindshare of the distant-second-place browser, on the distant-second-place platform, wasn't worth pursuing. A week later we had a meeting with high-up people at Apple, where they told us they were doing a browser. And the week after that, after confirming it with Bill Gates, who was reportedly sad but understanding of the decision, MacIE was officially shut down.

MSN-for-MacOSX went ahead, and was also critically acclaimed, but once released, indications were that the number of users was about the same as the number of developers. After that, MacBU concentrated once again on the next Office release, and MacIE has been well and truly and permanently dead ever since.

Over the whole sad journey, the single most surprising thing I ever discovered was from a small conversation that went:

Me: "Look, if it makes sense to devote dozens of people to WinIE, then surely it makes sense to devote half a dozen to MacIE!"

Higher-up: <confused look> "There aren't dozens of people on WinIE. WinIE had some great people on it! We need those great people on products that make money!"

Me: "Then why on earth did we pursue IE in the first place? Just so that the DOJ would sue us?"

Higher-up: <confused look>

Some day I hope to get a proper answer on our motivation to do WinIE and MacIE in the first place. It seems to be that we were scared of not having control of the HTML standard. And indeed, now that Firefox is gaining traction, Microsoft has added more people to WinIE again.

Jimmy Grewal also has a blog post about this entitled End of an era: Mac Internet Explorer where he writes

This announcement has sparked some debate on Slashdot, which was inevitable. Omar pointed me to a comment to this by our former co-worker Jorg Brown, who now works for Google, which I’ll quote below:
... [see above excerpt]
A lot of what he says is true; but the story is more complex than this and there were many other factors that came into play. Issues which he doesn’t cover…primarily because he wasn’t working on the product much until the last few months of development:

  • - Mac IE was the first real browser running on Mac OS X. We had it running on Developer Preview 2 and it shipped on the Public Beta CD-ROM. That was a great engineering achievement but it came at a very high price. Developing for OS X in those early days was a nightmare and we spent so much time struggling with OS bugs and changing APIs that precious time that could have been used to improve the product was wasted just trying to maintain compatibility with each new beta release of OS X.

  • - Apple was a pain in the ass sometimes. For a company with such great PR, they really were very unprofessional and treated developers poorly. I know that the OS X transition was tough, but there are so many stories I could tell of stupidity at Apple and policies which made no sense…but I won’t. I’ll just say that Apple had a lot more involvement in the development of Mac IE and it’s eventual end than Jorg gives them credit for. There were times during the last two years of working at Microsoft that I really hated Apple’s management…which was very difficult for me being such a loyal fan of their products and having so many friends who worked there.

  • - No clear direction from our management was the last major factor which Jorg touched upon but is important to mention again. Towards the end, we had some major changes in management at the MacBU and the new team was inexperienced both with the products they were managing and how to deal with Apple. They were further handicapped by lack of clear direction by our execs who were too busy worrying about AOL, the DOJ, and our stock price.

The common thread in both perspectives is that management at Microsoft didn't see much value in continuing with IE on the Mac. Jorg doesn't seem to understand why but the reason seems clearer to me.Microsoft is a platform company. We have built the most popular software platforms on the planet; Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. In the 1990s, two technologies/products attempted to take the place of Windows as the world's #1 developer platform. These technologies/products were the Java platform produced by Sun Microsystems and the Netscape Navigator web browser produced by Netscape. Microsoft met both challenges in a variety of ways including making sure that Windows  (a) was the best platform to run Java applications and (b) had the best Web browser on any platform. The goal was simple if Java or the web browser became the platform, then that platform would at the end still be a Windows platform. Of course, some other decisions Microsoft made with regards to competing with Sun and Netscape landed the company in court with billions of dollars in fines and settlements. 

Fast forward to the early 2000s, the browser wars are over and IE is the world's dominant Web browser. In an almost text book example of how monopolies work, Microsoft abandoned innovation in IE in a move that showed that at this point IE was considered a cost center not a revenue generator. It simply doesn't make business sense for Microsoft to invest in a technology that dintermediates it's most popular platform, the Windows operating system. This should sound familiar to you if you've read The Innovators Dilemma.

It's now the mid-2000s and the Web browser landscape has changed. Technologies such as DHTML and IXMLHttpRequest which were invented by Microsoft to make IE the best developer platform on the Web have been adopted by competitors like Google and rival Web browsers like Mozilla. Despite our best efforts, the Windows platform is being routed around and even worse it is by technologies we invented. In this case Microsoft has been hoisted by its own petard

These developments have caused renewed interest in IE [at least on Windows] by Microsoft which is why I went from two years of being a Microsoft employee and not believing an IE team existed to reading the IE blog which makes it seem that there is now a veritable army of developers working on IE. The only problem is that I expect that history will repeat itself. What happens when IE reaches feature parity with Mozilla? Will we have to wait until Windows Blackcomb until we see Internet Explorer 8? Given how Microsoft [and specifically the Windows division] works this isn't as crazy an idea as it sounds. 

I can think of two ways to prevent history from repeating itself. The first is that Microsoft officially disbands the IE team after IE 7. The second is that Microsoft transfers the IE team to a product group that actually depends on browser innovative to make money such as MSN Windows Live. We haven't innovated in the browser for almost a decade. IE 5 was the last truly innovative release. Ex-IE team members like Scott Berkun who wrote the classic How to build a better web browser show exactly stagnant the world of Web browser innovation has been this century. Given that Microsoft views IE as a defensive option to make Windows an enticing product, there is less incentive to make it the ultimate browsing experience as products whose bread and butter is the Web browser. Why do you think there are so many Google employees working on Mozilla?

Microsoft should either cede innovation in the Web browser to Mozilla/Google or make IE more than just "icing on the Windows user experience cake"by transfering the product to a team whose bottom line depends on browser innovation. Of course, I doubt that my words will be taken seriously by folks at Microsoft [except as a reason to send my boss or his boss angry mail] but this needs to be said.


 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube

December 19, 2005
@ 05:56 PM

Robert Scoble has a post entitled Riya not recognized by Google where he recommends that Microsoft look into purchasing Riya.com. He writes

I’ve heard many rumors about Riya over the past few weeks. One strong rumor, reported by Om Malik, among others, was that Riya was getting purchased by Google.

I know our M&A guys had met with Riya too and had passed on the deal after negotiations got too expensive (translation someone else had bid more than we were willing to pay). So, I was suprised that during the past few days I had heard that Riya’s deal with Google wasn’t going to happen.

Today Munjal, Riya’s CEO, said on his blog that they were going to continue on as an independent firm and that the rumors are incorrect.

This is actually very good for Microsoft and Yahoo. Why? Cause this team is high quality and the technology is great (I’ve been using the alpha recently and like it a lot).

Now, why doesn’t Microsoft purchase them? Well, I’ve been in contact with our M&A folks. We have a lot of NIH syndrome here cause we have similar technology that our research teams have developed. I’ve seen our photo/face recognition capabilities and they are pretty cool too and, indeed, are better in some areas and not as good in others.

I have a couple of opinions here but mostly it is advice to Robert given that I've been recently involved in acquisition related discussions as part of my day job. My main thought about Google passing on Riya is that I expected this given that they demoed their in-house image recognition software at the Web 2.0 conference. Thus purchasing Riya would primarily be about augmenting their internal development team which reduces the value of the deal to Google.

From a Microsoft perspective, I'd expect to see a bunch of NIH as well. We have folks who are doing quite a lot in the area of improving digital photograph at Microsoft Research. You can read about some of the work in articles like MSR's Life of a Digital Photo or view demos about interesting work in Object class recognition from the Cambridge arm of Microsoft Research. I don't think I've seen anything as cool as the stuff demoed by Riya and Google but we do have some interesting stuff cooking at Microsoft Research nonetheless. 

The problem for Scoble is finding a product team that actually thinks what Riya is doing is valuable enough to make it worth however many tens of millions of dollars the VCs think the company is worth. Simply saying "What they are doing is cool" isn't enough. The folks at MSR face the same problems and the fact that there aren't lots of transitions from cool research demo to Microsoft product shows just how difficult this process can be. 


 

Categories: Technology

December 17, 2005
@ 05:15 PM

A friend of mine called me yesterday to ask for my opinions on the fact that Meebo just got a few million dollars in funding. For those not in the know, Meebo is an AJAX version of Trillian. And what is Trillian? It's an instant messaging client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC.

In his post How Much Did Meebo Get? Om Malik asks

Here is the rub: Since the company basically aggregates all four major IM networks in a browser, all the four major IM owners - AMYG are out of the acquisition game. One of them buys the company, the others shut down access to their respective networks. The very quality that makes Meebo attractive to end-users will make it difficult for them to be acquired. But there is one option: eBay. When all fails, you know who to call. Skype did. Interactive Corp is another long shot, but they are bargain hunters not premium payers.

Regarding acquisitions, there are three reasons why one of the major players would buy a company; users, technology and people. Unless the start up is in a brand new market that the major player isn't playing in, buying a company for its users is usually not the case. This is because big players like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft usually either have orders of magnitude more users than the average 'popular' startup or could get just as many or more users when they ship a rival service. The more common reason for a big player like Microsoft or Yahoo! buying a company is for exclusive technology/IP and for the development team. Yahoo! buying del.icio.us or Flickr isn't about getting access to the 250,000 - 300,000 users of these services given that they have less users than the least popular services on Yahoo!'s network. Instead it's about getting people like Joshua Schachter, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield building the next generation of Yahoo!'s products. Don Dodge covers this in slightly more detail in his post Microsoft will acquire my company.

Let's talk about Meebo specifically. The user base is too small to be a factor so the interesting things are the technology and the people. First we should look at the technology. An AJAX instant messaging client isn't novel and companies like Microsoft have been providing one for years. A framework built on reverse engineering IM protocols is cool but not useful. As Om Malik points out, the major players tolerate activities like companies like Meebo & Trillian because it is counterproductive for [example] AOL suing a tiny company like Trillian for misusing its network. On the other hand, they wouldn't tolerate it from a major player like Microsoft primarily because that becomes a significant amount of traffic on their network and licensing access becomes a valid revenue generating scenario. Thus, the technology is probably not worth a great deal to one of the big players. That leaves the people,  according to the Meebo team page there are three people; a server dev, a DHTML/AJAX dev and a business guy (likely to be useless overhead in an acquisition). The question then is how many million dollars would Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft think is worth for the skills of both [most likely excellent] developers? Then you have to factor in the markup because the company got VC funding...

You can probably tell that I agree with Om Malik that it is unlikely that this company would be of interest to any of the four major IM players.

If you are building a Web startup with the intention of flipping it to one of the majors, only three things matter; technology/IP, users and
the quality of your technical team. Repeatedly ask yourself: would Microsoft want our users? would Google want our technology? would Yahoo! want our people?

It's as simple as that.


 

Categories: Technology