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.

The Magic (of) Quadrants

Gartner Group published a report titled Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software (ID#G00151493) this week. The money shot in any Gartner report is, you guessed it, the magic quadrant.

What makes this quadrant so fascinating is that there are no leaders according to Gartner, and only two who qualify as visionary but in reality only one (more on that later). In fact, according to Gartner, there are only two companies that are above the line with regard to ability to execute. Well that's kinda interesting.

Here at NewsGator this report was the topic of much discussion. We were debating our decision not to participate in the group of companies Nikos Drakos included in the analysis and we tried to make sense of the large cluster of companies in the niche sector.

The Gartner view of team collaboration and social software, and this is just an observation and not a judgement, is still rooted in the blogs and wikis mindset, which is not what we do so according to how Gartner is segmenting the market there really wasn't much upside for us.

We believe the market is much broader than Gartner is allowing, encompassing content relevancy, discovery, and surfacing (what you need, when you need it, and in an app that can use it), user profile data, user initiated action, such as sharing and tagging, coupled with user generated content. Of course, were Gartner to include the full spectrum of collaboration offerings then the niche sector in this quadrant would be overwhelmed with companies.

The other observation I would make about this quadrant, which is that several of these companies are in fact represented in several places. Our friends at Socialtext participate in Intel's SuiteTwo, along with NewsGator and SixApart, and also over on Microsoft's Sharepoint with a bolt on wiki, as does Atlassian.

In retrospect, not participating in this report was basically the right decision. This market is in the early stages of development, and as Nikos rightly concludes, it's early enough to declare there to be no leaders. Consolidation is inevitable and the companies that successfully offer an integrated suite of products will ultimately move to the leader sector.

This validates our decision to engage with ecosystems as opposed to creating buckets of functions that overlap with what our customers platform vendors are offering, and the already mentioned SuiteTwo package is a great example of how an integrated suite can capture visionary status through offering a best of breed suite with integrated administration capabilities.

We made a strategic decision to partner with Microsoft on not only Sharepoint with our Social Sites product but also the broader Microsoft stack with our NewsGator Enterprise Server and this enables us to move in the market with the ease of knowing we are benefiting from the platform investments and customer reach that Microsoft enables.

Gartner is right, there are no true leaders in this market right now but the market is accelerating and leaders will emerge in the next 12 months based on core product strength, partner development, and of course, customer acquisition.

-- Jeff Nolan is VP Corporate Development for NewsGator Technologies.

Technorati Tags: blogs, Gartner, NewsGator, wikis

All the cool Enterprise RSS ideas ...

Good blog post from Scott Reynolds (corrected!) about why RSS for enterprises.  Points to at least four enterprise uses for RSS (excerpts): 

Leads Management --Why not tell a sales guy about a new lead using RSS?...

Trigger Based and Data Mined Intelligence --Imagine a scenario where a user profiles themselves on an intranet site and subscribes to an RSS feed. A data mining engine then uses that profile and periodically matches it to data in the warehouse...

Customised Report Subscriptions --With custom RSS feeds - the potential is huge...

Internal Communications -- From social events to the latest revenue flash reports....

Sony Ericsson: RSS a mobile killer app.

Excerpt from the Sony white paper (via Ross Mayfield);

Push services are on the rise on the Internet, based on the de facto standard RSS. We believe that RSS has a great potential in mobile phones, as a technology to automatically provide updated content to users - accessing the Web without browsing.

Morgan, Stanley; RSS is the future for online services...

Remember Mary Meeker? Morgan Stanley's all-star internet analyst is ba-ack (via lockergnome) ....

She recently completed a research piece on the next drivers for online services -- and it's extremely bullish about RSS. Excerpts;

Three factors are combining to drive online momentum: 1) rising usage of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) by content providers as a standard distribution platform for online content; 2) ramp in creation of blogs and other user-generated content and 3) Yahoo!’s easy-to-use integration of RSS feeds with My Yahoo!.

...In general, we believe ongoing improvements in the following areas will be important to
watch: 1) search; 2) personalization; 3) user-generated content (including blogs, reviews, images and audio); 4) music; 5) short- and long-form video; and 6) accessibility (including mobile devices and the PC desktop). Net, we are moving nicely down a path toward every Internet user, in
effect, having a personal media server…

...RSS has become shorthand for syndication, in the same way that MP3 was
shorthand for digital audio for the longest time. We believe that the simplicity of RSS is reminiscent of the
simple user experience popularized by Google Search.

What about enterprise RSS portals, too?

Stay tuned!

Good online RSS resource

The Software Marketing Newsletter looks to be an active source for current news and info about blogs, rss, software, and marketing.

(Note; found this via an 'RSS' keyword search set up in NewsGator. Further note; the prior post in that feed was from Der Spiegel's RSS feed, entitled "Islamkritischer Filmemacher erschossen". Wheat and a bit of chaff ... ...).

Highlights:

-- Article Syndication -- Key to Content -- argues that RSS is found money for web sites which depend on fresh content

--New Microsoft ISV weblog