Recently someone asked in the comments to one of my posts why I seem to be down on the WS-* family of technologies (XSD, WSDL, SOAP, etc) when just a few years ago I worked on Microsoft’s implementations of some of these technologies and used to blog about them extensively.

I was composing a response when I stumbled on James Snell’s notes on the recent QCon conference that captures the spirit of my “conversion” if you want to call it that. He wrote

Those who are familiar with my history with IBM should know that I was once a *major* proponent of the WS-* approach. I was one of the original members of the IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit team, I wrote so many articles on the subject during my first year with IBM that I was able to pay a down payment on my house without touching a dime of savings or regular paycheck, and I was involved in most of the internal efforts to design and prototype nearly all of the WS-* specifications. However, over the last two years I haven’t written a single line of code that has anything to do with WS-*. The reason for this change is simple: when I was working on WS-*, I never once worked on an application that solved a real business need. Everything I wrote back then were demos. Now that I’m working for IBM’s WebAhead group, building and supporting applications that are being used by tens of thousands of my fellow IBMers, I haven’t come across a single use case where WS-* would be a suitable fit. In contrast, during that same period of time, I’ve implemented no fewer than 10 Atom Publishing Protocol implementations, have helped a number of IBM products implement Atom and Atompub support, published thousands of Atom feeds within the firewall, etc. In every application we’re working on, there is an obvious need to apply the fundamental principles of the REST architectural style. The applications I build today are fundamentally based on HTTP, XML, Atom, JSON and XHTML.

My movement towards embracing building RESTful Web services from being a WS-* advocate is based on my experiences as someone who worked on the fundamental building blocks of these technologies and then as someone who became a user of these technologies when I moved to MSN Windows Live. The seeds were probably sown when I found myself writing code to convert Microsoft’s GetTopDownloads Web service to an RSS feed because the SOAP Web service was more complicated to deal with and less useful than an RSS feed. Later on I realized that RSS was the quintessential RESTful Web service and just asking people “How many RSS feeds does Microsoft produce?” versus how many SOAP endpoints does Microsoft expose is illuminating in itself.

Since then we’ve reached a world where thousands of applications being utilized by millions of end users are built on RESTful Web services on the public internet. My favorite example of the moment is the Facebook developer platform and before that it was Flickr and Amazon S3. Compare that with the number of SOAP and WS-* interfaces that are being used to build real developer platforms that benefit end users on the Web today.

Earlier today, I was contemplating Don Box’s recent post where he complained about the diversity of authentication schemes of various RESTful Web services from the “J. Random Facebook/Flickr/GData” services on the Web today. Don seems to hint that WS-Security/WS-Trust would somehow solve this problem which is rightfully debunked by Sam Ruby who points out that all those technologies do is give you a more complicated version of the extensible authentication story that is available in HTTP. So the only real issue here is that there are actually enough RESTful Web services on the Internet for Don Box to complain about the diversity that comes from having a flexible authentication model for Web services. On the other hand, there are so few useful public WS-* Web services on the Web (read: zero) that Don Box hadn’t encountered the same problem with WS-Security/WS-Trust since no one is actually using them.

At this point I realize I’m flogging a dead horse. The folks I know from across the industry who have to build large scale Web services on the Web today at Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Windows Live, Amazon, etc are using RESTful Web services. The only times I encounter someone with good things to say about WS-* is if it is their job to pimp these technologies or they have already “invested” in WS-* and want to defend that investment.

At the end of the day, my job is to enable successful developer platforms that enrich our users’ lives not pimp a particular technology. So if you are one of my readers and were wondering what was behind my shift from thinking that WS-* related technologies were the cat’s pajamas and my current RESTful Web services/APP/GData/Web3S bent, now you know.

Enjoy.

Now playing: Brooke Valentine - Girlfight (feat. Big Boi & Lil Jon)


 

Categories: XML Web Services

November 14, 2007
@ 01:57 PM

I’ve finally gotten around to uploading a couple of pictures from our wedding day in Las Vegas.  Below are a few of the pictures I liked the most. Click on them to see more pics.


Wedding Favors

Guess Where?

Bride, Maid of Honor and Mom

Groom, Best Man and the Non-Conformist

It was a really nice day

Holding hands

The photographers took several hundred pictures and we’ve sifted through less than half of them. Since it’s taken us so long just to pick out this two dozen or so pictures I though if we waited much longer I’d be posting the wedding pics on around our first or second anniversary. Smile

Now playing: Jay-Z - What More Can I Say


 

Categories: Personal

Although the choice of whether to pick between WS-* and REST when deciding to build services on the Web seems like a foregone conclusion, there seems to be one or two arguments on the WS-* that refuse to die. You can find a them in the notes on the talk by Sanjiva Weerawarana at QCon, WS-* vs. REST: Mashing up the Truth from Facts, Myths and Lies 

  • history: why were WS created? people were doing XML over HTTP in 1998/1999
  • everyone invented their own way to do security, reliability, transactions, … (e.g. RosettaNet, ebXML)
  • Biggest criticism of SOAP in 2000: lack of security
  • REST-* is on its way - ARGH!

Today you can find other members of the Web Services community echoing some of Sanjiva’s points. You have Don Box in his blog post entitled Yes Steve, I've Tried saying

I wouldn't call myself an advocate for any specific technology (ducks), but I've spent a lot of time doing HTTP stuff, including a recent tour of duty to help out on our .NET 3.5 support for REST in WCF.

I have to say that the authentication story blows chunks.

Having to hand-roll yet another “negotiate session key/sign URL” library for J. Random Facebook/Flickr/GData clone doesn't scale. 

and even Sam Ruby adds his voice in agreement with his post  Out of the Frying Pan where he writes

I’d suggest that the root problem here has nothing to to with HTTP or SOAP, but rather that the owners and operators of properties such as Facebook, Flickr, and GData have vested interests that need to be considered.

For once I have to agree with Sanjiva and disagree with Sam and Don. The folks at Google, Yahoo!  and a bunch of the other Silicon Valley startups realize that having umpteen different application interfaces, authentication and authorization stories is a pain for developers build mashups, widgets and full blown Web applications. The answer isn’t as Don argues that we all jump on WS-* or as Sam suggests that Web companies have a vested interest keeping the situation fragmented so we have to live with it.

In fact, we are already on the road to REST-* as a way to address this problem. What happens when you put together AtomPub/GData, OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial? Sounds a lot like the same sort of vision Microsoft was pitching earlier in the decade, except this time it is built on a sturdier foundation [not crap like SOAP, WSDL and XSD] and is being worked on collaboratively by members of the Web community instead of a bunch of middleware vendors.

It’s unsurprising that Don and Sam don’t realize this is occuring given that their employers (Microsoft and IBM respectively) are out of the loop on most of this evolution which is primarily being by driven by Google and it’s coalition of the willing. Then again, it does remind me of how IBM and Microsoft pulled the same thing on the industry with WS-*. I guess turnabout is fair play. Wink

Now playing: D12 - American Psycho


 

I've been pondering the implications of Facebook's SocialAds announcement and it has created some interesting lines of thought. The moment the pin dropped was when Dave Winer linked to one of his old posts that contains the following money quote

that's when the whole idea of advertising will go poof, will disappear. If it's perfectly targeted, it isn't advertising, it's information. Information is welcome, advertising is offensive.

If you think about it, the reason Google makes so much money from search advertising is because the ads are particularly relevant when a user is seeking information or a trusted opinion as part of the process to make a commercial decision. If I'm searching for "iPod" or "car insurance" then it is quite likely that ads selling me these products are relevant to my search and are actually considered to be information instead of intrusive advertising

Where Google's model breaks down is that a large amount of the advertising out there is intended to make you want to buy crap that you weren't even interested in until you saw the ads. In addition, trusted recommendations are a powerful way to convince customers to make purchases they were otherwise not considering. Former Amazon employee Greg Linden has written blog posts that indicate that 20% - 35% of Amazon's sales comes from recommendations like "people who like 50 Cent also like G-Unit". Given that Amazon made over 10 billion dollars in revenue last year (see financials), this means that $2 billion to $3.5 billion of that revenue is based on what Facebook is calling "social" ads.

So what does all this have to do with the title of my blog post? Glad you asked. Recently Yaron and I were chatting about the virtues of the Facebook platform. He argued that the fact that applications are encouraged to keep their data within their own silos (e.g. Flixster isn't supposed to be mucking with my iLike data and vice versa) prevents everyone [including Facebook] from benefiting from all this profile data being created from alternate sources. I argued that seeing the complexities introduced by having multiple applications being able to write to the same data store (e.g. the Windows registry) it's a lot better for users and app developers if they don't have to worry that some half baked app written by some drunken college kid is going to hose their Scrabulous scores or corrupt all their movie ratings. 

However what this means is that some of the juiciest data to serve "social" ads against within Facebook (i.e. movies and music) is not in Facebook's databases but in the databases of the developers of Facebook applications like Slide, iLike and Flixster. Considering the following entry that shows up in my friends news feeds after I performed an action in iLike ,

This entry could be improved with "social" ads in a way that is informative and valuable to my friends while also providing financial value to the application developer. For instance, would you consider the following changes to that entry to be advertising or information?

Flixster does an even worse job than iLike in making the actions they show in my news feed to be both useful and monetizable. Here's the kind of stuff that shows up in my news feed from Flixster

I don't know about you but I consider this spam. In fact, it is also misleading since what it really means is that someone on my friends list (Steve Gordon) has also installed the Flixster application on their profile. However what if the application actually published some of my movie ratings into the news feed with more context such as

People keep asking how Facebook application developers will make money. From where I'm sitting, this looks like a freaking gold mine. The problem seems to be that these applications either haven't yet figured out how lucrative a position they're in or are still in the audience acquisition phase until they flip to the highest bidder.

If Mark Zuckerburg has any strategic bone in his body, he'd snap up these companies before a hostile competitor like Google or Fox Interactive Media does. I'd put money on it that people are slowly realizing this all over Silicon Valley. 

What do you think?


 

When I first saw the Meebo Me widget, I thought it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen on the Web. I immediately went to chat with some folks on our team and the response was that they were already way ahead of me. After a bunch of hard work, I’m glad to say that you can now embed the world’s most popular IM client into any Web page [including your blog or favorite social networking site] and let anyone who’s visiting that page chat with you while you’re online.

More details can be found in Casey’s post on the Windows Live Messenger team’s blog entitled Who wants IMs from the web? I do! I do! where she writes

The Windows Live™ Messenger IM Control lets people on the Web reach you in Messenger by showing your Messenger status on your web site, blog, or social networking profile. The Windows Live™ Messenger IM Control runs in the browser and lets site visitors message you without installing Messenger first. The IM Control is supported in IE6, IE7, and Firefox 2.0 on Windows and Firefox 2.0 on Mac OS. The IM Control is supported in 32 languages.

This is a nice addition to the IM button functionality announced in Ali's post.  An important difference between the two is that the new Windows Live™ Messenger IM Control allows people to send you IMs without installing Windows Live™ Messenger, and the IM button requires that they have it installed and are logged in.

I’ve already thrown it up on my Windows Live Space at http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com so anyone who wants to chat with me in real time can holla at me without having to install any bits.  I expect it won’t be long before someone figures out how to port it to the Facebook platform which is something I’d love to see. I’d do it myself but I have RSS Bandit feature planning to work on in my free time. Smile

To prevent IM spam (aka SPIM), there is a Human Interactive Proof (HIP) challenge before a conversation can be initiated from the Web. For users concerned about privacy and wondering if anyone can just copy & paste some HTML, change some values and then spam you from the Web…rest assured this has been considered. In order for your online presence to be detected or IM conversations begun from the Web, you first have to turn on this feature. Safe defaults and making sure our users are always in control of their Web experience is key. 

So what are you waiting for? Come over and say hello.    

Now playing: Jodeci - Come & Talk To Me


 

Categories: Windows Live

Disclaimer: This post does not reflect the opinions, thoughts, strategies or future intentions of my employer. These are solely my personal opinions. If you are seeking official position statements from Microsoft, please go here.

Tim O'Reilly has an insightful post entitled OpenSocial: It's the data, stupid where he writes

My disappointment with OpenSocial was crystallized by an exchange between Patrick Chanezon, Google's developer advocate for the program, and an audience member at the OpenSocial session at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin.
...
Let's start with the first one. If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that's a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don't want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.
...
Imagine what would have happened to Google maps if instead of supporting mashups, they had built a framework that allowed developers to create mapping applications across Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google as a way of competing with MapQuest. Boring! That's the equivalent of what they've announced here.

Given the amount of attention my last set of posts on this topic garnered I'm hesitant to write about OpenSocial again. I won't say much except to say that I'm glad to see that Tim O'Reilly gets it. At the end of the day, the most that can come from OpenSocial is that a bunch of sites are better able to create the kinds of walled gardens that Facebook has done. As an end user, this doesn't mean much to me since I'm already quite happy using my social networking site of choice.  It's pretty naive to think that the fact that some social networking site can now host Vampires or Scrabulous will make it a game changing competitor to Facebook. It shows a complete misunderstanding of the dynamics of social software.

The folks at Google trumpeted this announcement with the phrase "The Web is the Platform". I don't think that phrase means what they think it means. If you fight the Web, you will lose. I completely agree with Mark Cuban that the interesting thing is now that I've built so much metadata about myself, my interests and my relationships into Facebook, it would be great to utilize that investment around the Web. And I don't just mean showing me targeted ads for G-Unit sneakers  on Web sites I frequent because you know I friended 50 Cent.

C'mon Leah, you guys can do better than that. :)  


 

Categories: Social Software

I've seen a couple of recent articles talking about how Facebook has turned on it's platform developers with it's most recent announcements. Fortune magazine has an article today entitled Fear Among Facebook Developers which states

Zuckerberg wouldn’t deny it. On stage at the Web 2.0 conference in October in San Francisco, he acknowledged that his company reserves the right to build anything it wants and compete with any of its independent developers, but that the company intends to do this fairly. “We need to make sure we have the flexibility to do what we need as the platform grows—to be flexible enough able to add in the next big component [like the News Feed],” he said.

Yesterday Erick Schonfeld wrote an article on TechCrunch entitled iLike vs. Facebook: The Battle For The Music Artist that contains the following excerpt

Instead, Facebook is treating music artists just like any other brands, which can also set up their own Facebook pages, collect fans, and market to them directly. Yet, when it comes to music artists, one of Facebook’s most popular application developers, iLike, is doing the exact same thing.
...
So if you are a music artist, you now have to make a decision: Do you go with the iLike page as your main Facebook page (and take advantage of the nearly 10 million members who use the iLike app), or do you go with your own advertiser page on Facebook? Case in point: the new Facebook page for 50 Cent (shown left) had only three fans when it first went up just after midnight, compared to 1.2 million fans on his iLike page on Facebook.

This is a tale as old as the hills. Software platforms evolve and often this means incorporating features that were once considered as "features to be provided by others" as core parts of the platform. There are thousands of examples of application developers adding value to a platform that eventually became features of the platform due to popular demand. Whether it is adding a TCP/IP stack to the operating system, tabbed browsing to a Web browser or adding persistent searches to a Web mail application, it's all the same story. It is hard to argue that it isn't better for users such functionality to be a native part of the platform or underlying application, however it often leaves the platform developers in a lurch.

If the application developer cannot find a new way to add value to the platform then their usefulness to users comes to an end. This doesn't make it a slam dunk that once the platform vendor sees the value added by an application on it's platform, that things will eventually go sour for the application. There are many examples of vendors trying to compete with an application on their platform only to concede defeat and then try to acquire the company; PhotoBucket's acquisition by MySpace and Oracle's attempt to acquire BEA are two recent examples. [Editors note - I suspect that iLike vs. Facebook will end up going the same route as well]. In other cases, entry into the application space by the platform vendor helps to validate the market and draws more visibility to it from users.  

At the end of the day, articles like the ones I've mentioned above serve to prove that Facebook has actually built a viable and successful platform given that it is following the patterns of other successful platforms from the past several decades of the software industry.


 

Mitch Radcliffe has a blog post on ZDNet entitled Google: Does it have to be all FUD all the time? where he writes

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD–see Wikipedia) is how IBM tried to retain its dominance, what Microsoft used to cement its monopoly and, now, I suggest we review recent Google news and wonder:
...
Basically, four of the last five press releases from Google have amounted to “me and my friends are going to…” beat a major competitor or rule a marketplace based on pre-announcements without a great deal of substance or products that can be seen and used today. Google sounds more like Microsoft circa 1988-to-1992, when it was launching consortia right and left to block competitors without delivering much, or any, real product. Microsoft still does this, but it doesn’t enjoy the credibility (or, better, the credulousness) that greet Google announcements.

It seems I'm not the only one that noticed this trend. I guess the Features Not Products initiative morphed into a "FUD Not Products" initiative somewhere along the line. :)

Or maybe they just hit a critical mass of ex-Microsoft employees from the old days.

PS: For bonus points, read Dave Winer's Why Google launched OpenSocial.


 

There's been a bunch of activity in the Windows Live world this week. The first bit of news is that a service I've been wanting us to ship for a while is now in public beta, Windows Live Calendar. You can learn more about it in the blog post titled Make some plans with the new Windows Live Calendar beta! on the Windows Live Hotmail team's blog which states

In the past few years, we’ve been investing heavily in building the best web e-mail offering. But part of the team has also been intently focused on delivering the next-generation web calendar: Windows Live Calendar. It’s been a long time coming and we’ve been pretty hush-hush about it. Today, we’re finally ready to invite the world to try the new Windows Live Calendar beta!
...

Stay coordinated with friends and family

If you have a family, you know how difficult it is to coordinate schedules between spouses and kids’ activities. If you’re a student, you know how consuming it is to find time to meet for school projects with your classmates. By sharing schedules on Windows Live Calendar, we take the chore out of coordination.

· Share as much or as little of your calendar with free/busy, read-only, or read/write permissions.

· Send friends a view-only secret link to your calendar so they don’t need to sign in with a Windows Live ID.

You can also make your calendar public, so if you’re running a business or an organization that is keen on promoting events, you can make it easy for people to find out what’s going on.

Get reminded

Sometimes we forget our commitments so Windows Live Calendar delivers you reminders through e-mail, Windows Live Messenger, or an SMS message on your mobile phone. You can also wake up to your upcoming schedule by including an RSS feed of your calendar on your favorite home page like Live.com, or My.MSN.com. Because Windows Live Calendar supports the iCal standard, you can add any ICS-based calendar you find on the Internet so you don’t miss out on your favorite sports games, movie openings or upcoming holidays. To start, try our holiday calendar list or go to the iCalShare site.

I've been using it quite a bit already and I have to say there's all sorts of AJAXy goodness in the product which is also described in the blog post. The bit in red font above is something I started of working with the Calendar team on until I switched projects and Ali took it over. Congratulations to the Calendar folks. I know they've been wanting to get this out for a while. Kudos on a great beta.

The next bit of Windows Live news is that you can now get a @live.com email address by going to http://get.live.com/getlive/overview or http://www.windowslive.com/freshstart.html . The latter page informs readers

Here's the deal—if you currently have an e-mail address with Hotmail.com or MSN.com or a Microsoft Passport, you already have a Windows Live™ ID. Now you have a choice:

Keep your old account and continue to enjoy all of your favorite Windows Live services.

OR

Get a new Windows Live ID (i.e., example@live.com) and take advantage of your fresh start!

The page goes on to explain how to switch email addresses but still keep all your information and contacts in Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger. The always up to date folks at LiveSide have a comprehensive list of all the @live.xx domains that are available to choose from. So what are you waiting for? Get yours, I already got mine.

The final bit of news is that the next generation of Windows Live services and desktop products is finally here. All the Windows Live desktop applications and non-beta Web properties have been refreshed. You can learn more at http://www.windowslive.com or from the press release Microsoft’s Windows Live Free Online Services Available Now.

I personally like some of the favorable press this release has garnered in press such as Mary J Foley's article Microsoft’s Windows Live finally starting to come into its own which is excerpted below

Until recently, Microsoft has floundered badly when trying to explain exactly what Windows Live is and how Live services and Live software complement Windows. Last year, the Windows Live team was unveiling new services at a breakneck pace, but doing nothing to put them in context or explain when/how Microsoft planned to take them final.

Now Microsoft is starting to talk about different groupings of Windows Live services and software. It is positioning the Windows Live Client Suite as what users should install on their home PCs. Home.live.com is the starting point for users who want to “anywhere access” to their Windows Live services. Mobile.Live.com is the home for Microsoft’s growing family of Live services for mobile phones and PDAs. For those with smartphones, another option is a client-style suite of Live services for mobile devices (like what Nokia is providing now on certain Windows Mobile phone models).

In the new Windows Live world order, the Windows Live taxonomy looks something like this:

Windows Live Client Suite (single installer and updater; client-based software with a services extension)

...
Windows Live Web Suite (service only)
...
Microsoft still has quite a way to go to make its Windows Live story truly intuitive and understandable by non-Microsoft-watchers. But compared to where the company was even a year ago, the Live team has come a long way.

Nice. That's a pretty big compliment coming from a skeptic like Mary J. :)

With all the releases, it's now time for my favorite part. Figuring out what we're going to ship next. Stay tuned.


 

Categories: Windows Live

I’ve started thinking about the next release of RSS Bandit and I thought it would be a good time to share some of my thoughts with our users and see what people would like us to add, fix or otherwise improve the application. It’s hard to believe that I started working on RSS Bandit almost five years ago. In that time, we’ve had the application downloaded over a million times and at the height of it’s popularity we were seeing up to a 100,000 downloads a month when we shipped a new release. Since then the popularity of the application has waned a little with the advent of Web-based feed readers like Bloglines and Google Reader as well as the fact that the amount of work Torsten and I can get done in our spare time pales in comparison to what folks who do this for a living like Nick Bradbury can get done.

That said, there are features I want from a feed reader that I don’t get from FeedDemon or Google Reader which is why I still work on RSS Bandit and why I started this blog entry. Below are the list of features I want us to do in the Phoenix release in order of which ones are most likely to be in the final version. Let me know what you think of them.

  • Meme Tracking: I’m now officially at the point where I don’t have enough time to read all the feeds I have in my subscription list anymore. For the most part, I’ve gotten around this by browsing programming.reddit, Techmeme and Sam Ruby’s MeMeme about once or twice a day. Although they are all great, the problem I have is that there are parts of the blogosphere that none of these sites is good at tracking. For example, none of these sites is really on top of the Microsoft employee blogosphere which I’m interested in for obvious reasons.

    I've been talking about building a feature similar to FeedDemon's popular topics for a long time but I've now gotten to the point where I don't think I can get a lot of value out of my blog subscriptions without having this feature.

  • Podcast Management User Interface: We kind of ran out of time with the last release and shipped a podcast downloading feature without an actual user interface for managing your podcasts (i.e. seeing pending downloads, percent complete, etc) which is really lame. Since I don’t subscribe to a lot of podcasts, this hasn’t been an issue. However I suspect that the reason I don’t is exactly because we didn’t complete implementation of this feature.

  • Plugin Model: One of the things I haven’t liked is that sometimes I want to add a single feature but once I check it in, I still need to wait for all the features slated for that release before we can get it out to users. We could move to having more frequent releases but I’m not sure people want to deal with reinstalling the application every two months because I added a single feature. What I’d like us to build a plugin model where we can ship meaningful extensions to the core application without having it tied to a release.

    I like the multi-pronged approach taken by Windows Live Writer where there are multiple APIs provided depending on the depth of integration and complexity of the functionality you’d like to add to the application. Torsten started on this a while ago but we never got around to refactoring the proposed extensibility APIs in a way that satisfied us.

  • Feeds Grouped by Sources: Right now, I’m not really happy with the way our integration with NewsGator Online works. There’s an issue with the fact that NewsGator doesn’t know what to do with intranet feeds or feeds that are actually on your local machine (for the wacky folks that subscribe to their system event logs). In addition, folks have asked if we'll ever integrate with the Windows RSS platform and I've had concerns about that since there are features we need that it doesn't provide.

    I’ve considered that the solution to both problems is to break out the My Feeds node into three sub-nodes; RSS Bandit feeds, Windows RSS platform feeds (shared with IE, Outlook and Windows Live Mail) and NewsGator feeds. This would require some radical re-engineering since it now assumes we’ll be using three different stacks to poll for feed updates but in the long run I think this is the right approach. This is probably the most complicated and controversial feature we’ll have in the release.  

  • A Single Node Mapping to Multiple Feeds: I was recently looking at my FriendFeed page and it brought home to me that many geeks have multiple feeds that represent the content they are placing on the Web. For example, my friend Joshua Allen has a personal weblog as well as a work-related weblog. It’s really lame to have two entries for him in RSS Bandit when it’s all the same person.

    The main problems with a feature like this aren't around the complexity of the information but more around how to represent this to users in the application in a way that is understandable and easy to manage.

If you are an RSS Bandit user I’d love to hear what you think of this list. Does this list sound relevant to you or are there more pressing features you’d like to see addressed first? Also what are your pet peeves?

PS: Someone recently asked me if there are any corporate RSS Bandit users. I know a bunch of folks use it at work and that some places actually have it as part of the default install on their work PCs but don’t have any details handy. If you have any anecdotes to share, I’d appreciate it.

Now playing: G-Unit - Poppin Them Thangs


 

Categories: RSS Bandit