Enterprise RSS

OpenSocial Developer Journal : Have We Met Before?

NewsGator is all about presenting the right view of your content when and where you want it. An important part of that concept in our RSS readers is synchronization. If I mark a post read on my mobile NewsGator Go! reader, that post is marked read everywhere else. We do this by tieing all of the user activity to a NewsGator account.

Now suppose I were to add Didja Hear (our OpenSocial application) to Plaxo where my user ID might be based on my NewsGator email address. I set some content preferences so Didja Hear only shows videos about movies, television, and music. I start sending videos to friends, making comments, getting videos from them, etc. Later on, I add Didja Hear to Orkut where I log in with my gmail address.

As an application developer, this scenario raises some questions. Should we prompt the user whenever they add our application to see if they have added it before? If we do that, we could link the two accounts. Then we can provide a benefit of keeping the same preference information.

We could take it a step further though as well. In my scenario above, I could possibly see a video sent from a friend on Orkut while viewing Didja Hear in Plaxo. That sounds like a nice benefit for the user – wherever you look at Didja Hear, you see all of your content and interaction from friends. But in addition with us needing to ask the user to connect the dots and the user feeling comfortable with connecting the two accounts, we have another couple of issues.

If my friend Sue in Orkut puts a comment on a video she sent to me, we show that as “Sue says: …”. We don’t store Sue’s actual name in our database. We store her Orkut ID. Now if I’m looking at Didja Hear in Plaxo, the only way we could show “Sue says: … “ is if we store that information. The alternative is for us to display the considerably less social message “Somebody said: … “.

Facebook has an explicit policy forbidding the storage of a user’s personal data for more than 24 hours, and I could see different container sites creating different usage policies around personal data. As an application developer, it would be ideal if there were some standard restrictions that could be applied to profile and friend data consistently from all container sites. For example, a user setting that says “Share my first name only in views outside this site” would be very helpful piece of information.

One small twist remains to be explored in this story, but that’s a subject for a future post. In the meantime, we need to get back to some real OpenSocial development.

Battling Corporate Information Dysfunction

I was doing research for a white paper and ran across a story from InformationWeek magazine that referenced a survey conducted last month by Accenture. More than a thousand middle managers of large companies in the U.S. and U.K. responded to questions around the way they gather, use and analyze information.

The results were alarming, if not altogether surprising, and the headline apropos: “Managers Say the Majority of Information Obtained for Their Work is Useless.” Some key takeaways:

• Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more the half of it has no value to them (this echoes the finding of a survey done for knowledge workers by IDC a couple of years ago).
• 59% miss valuable information that exists in their company as a result of poor information distribution.
• 42% say they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week.
• 45% said gathering information about what other parts of their company are doing is a big challenge (only 31% said the same is true for their competitors).
• 57% say that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing information for their jobs.

Am I here to say that if all of these companies were using Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and RSS feeds that none of them would feel this way? No, of course not. There have been many, many, many stories that talk about why people, culture and training have a huge impact on creating and/or solving problems.

However, I will tell you that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are a great place to start. Look at Enterprise RSS alone. At NewsGator, we have a large number of customers with managers who have expressed the same sentiments as the survey respondents but found that Enterprise RSS solutions helped them directly attack some of those problems. The publish-and-subscribe model dramatically reduces the search/multiple sites problem (first and last bullets above) and the fact that it helps move traffic away from the e-mail inbox to somewhere more easily accessible and less-cluttered significantly reduces the likelihood of missing valuable content or using the wrong information.

I’m planning to cover some of this in my white paper, but in the meantime, we cover some of these topics in our regular series of educational Webinars. Sign up here.

Todd Berkowitz
Director of Marketing

NewsGator buys FeedDemon

We released the news officially this morning.

The Q&A pretty well describes our thinking, to which I'd emphasize the addition of Nick Bradbury to the NewsGator team.  Nick is a serially-successful product designer and developer with an innate sense of how software should just work.  An example (he's too modest to boast himself); Nick offered tabbed IE browsing in FeedDemon from day one...

Nick and Greg Reinacker, NewsGator's founder and CTO, combined with the development team we've been assembling, give NewsGator unparalleled RSS technical leadership... ...

More generally, we've positioned NewsGator as the RSS platform company -- as Fred Wilson kindly points out, this accelerates that...

Best of all to hear happy customers on this, though...

Internal RSS

Keeps catching on:

Shel Holtz shares that the Amsterdam-based ING Groep got the early lead in using RSS for internal communications when it launched a pilot test with 200 employees early this year.

Blogs help architects..

... as in, software (via Scoble);

....I think blogging changes more than this.  It lets a product architect like me have a more direct relationship with the people for whom I am building products - with no interpreters in the middle.  It lets me add a new conversation - one focussed around the scientific aspects of what we are doing.  And allows (once we get things moving at the right clip) for deep discussions with people from other teams who are building complementary or potentially competing technologies. 

RSS is to the web as...

SATs have dropped analogies, but not the rest of the world:

...The best analogy I can offer is that RSS is to browsing what Tivo is to television viewing. As with Tivo and television, I can't imagine reading the web without RSS.

What Scoble said...

yep...

Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired.

I'll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.

eRSS

Private Syndication Feeds  (emergic.org)

Tim Bray points to an article by David Berlind:

For example, what if eBay had to contact only some of its customers. Why not have a separate feed for every customer? This is the same thinking that went into another idea I had -- overnight shippers setting up separate RSS feeds for every package they handle. This way, I can subscribe to packages I'm sending or receiving, and my RSS aggregator (Newsgator, etc.) alerts me to changes in each package's status. To keep a lid on the number of RSS feeds a shipper must run, the RSS feed for each package would expire a few days after the package arrives.

Use of RSS in such a one-to-one fashion does raise other questions, however. For example, can existing RSS-enabled systems reasonably scale to this level of service, and what would it mean for networks including the Internet? Also, what happens if malware finds its way onto users' systems? Could it, unbeknownst to the user, change the settings of an RSS subscription to poll a malicious feed -- and what can be done (such as securing the RSS client) to prevent that from happening? Finally, could widespread use of this approach be the backdoor towards flipping all existing e-mail solutions on their ear, turning them from SMTP-based store-and-forward systems to RSS-based alert-poll-and-retrieve systems (alert my mail server of an RSS feed that has something for me, poll that feed, and retrieve the message)? Running e-mail this way would make it very difficult for spammers to cover their tracks.

Moonwatching

We're thrilled that Charlie Wood has agreed to join NewsGator.

What Greg said, and what Sandy said. And what John said...

Not sure why you should be over the moon about enterprise RSS?  Ask Charlie.

Running fast to stay far away from... the me too zone...

RSS Primer

Softwareblog points to ventureblog's RSS-as-a-business primer:

• Browsers (readers): As RSS spread widely, thoughtful engineers designed a series of useful readers. These allow you to specify the content you want, and the reader will find and deliver it to you. There are now many readers, including You Subscribe, NewsGator, and IntraVNews (for Outlook), SharpReader (Windows client), NetNewsWire (Mac), Bloglines and My Yahoo (Web), as well as  many others.
• Plumbing: We are just starting to get tools to deal with the profusion of RSS content. These include…
  • RSS Search engines: Technorati,   Feedster, and others.
  • Portals for RSS content: Technorati, FeedDemon,   Bloglines, Syndic8, Del.icio.us, Blogdex, etc.    
  • Content Managers & Servers: Six Apart, Blogger, Feedburner, others.
  There are still   interesting services to create in this area, including personalization,   security, and other tools surrounding RSS. Plumbing is the area getting the   most VC attention these days. When a VC says they're looking into RSS, they   generally mean infrastructure.
• Media: This has grown up with the readers. Some of the existing players are now supporting RSS feeds, and the blogging phenomena has thrown up some new stars (Boing Boing, Instapundit, Endgadget, etc.).
• Business: RSS is still in the plumbing phase, so business and commerce concepts, such as advertising inserted in RSS feeds or charging for subscriptions are just now starting to appear. Some companies are also starting to poke around consumer commerce - Dulance, for example, is providing RSS feeds of price search results, so you know when prices change on items you've been eyeing. Others are exploring syndication of business data, or using RSS as a business communications standard.