March 2006 Archives

  1. Mar30

    March SF Tech Sessions summary

    Over 100 people participated in the second meeting of SF Tech Sessions last night at the Westin St. Francis. The crowd was a mix of bloggers, journalists, developers, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs all interested in learning about new products, people and ideas.

    Each presenter had about 15 minutes to engage the audience with a product demonstration. The first three presenters had launched within the last two weeks and Songbird launched about six weeks ago. Below are my brief summaries of each presenter.

    Skobee

    Noam Lovinsky of Skobee was the first presenter of the evening. Skobee helps plan meetups with firm or fuzzy plans. A plan may begin as "coffee next week" and a few stages later become "coffee at 8 a.m. at 1st and Main Starbucks." Skobee helps out each step of the way and helps you pick a venue.

    My favorite Skobee feature is the ability to view popular destinations by time or restricted by your group of contacts. Where do my friends and contacts like to have dinner on a Friday night? You might want to visit the same restaurant.

    Vast.com

    Naval Ravikant presented classified search engine Vast.com. Vast crawls the web looking for specific types of content. Vast currently indexes cars, jobs, and profiles, but Naval mentioned they can build a new vertical in about two weeks! A search for "BMW M5" within the car category returns results from a specialized M5 message board, a BMW classifieds page, and even a blog post. You can drill down in the results using metadata such as milage, price, model year, etc.

    Vast.com exposes their entire database as a REST API with no query limits. Vast will make money through premium placements within each search result page and share a portion of their revenue generated from sites using their API.

    Mozes

    Dorrian Porter presented mobile bookmarking tool Mozes. Mozes allows cell phone users to take notes on the run by sending a text message to its servers with special action terms. If a user sent the term "KFOG" to Mozes the server would retrieve the currently playing song from the KFOG radio station and display that information on its website for later viewing.

    Dorrian showed off some features still in development such as adding a Flickr contact from your mobile phone or retrieving product information from Amazon.com. The crowd last night was very interested in locking up keywords on the service for popular terms.

    Songbird

    Rob Lord and Navi from Songbird demonstrated their networked music player. Songbird is based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine and the entire application is open-source and extensible. You can view tracks on a web page such as a MP3 blog and subscribe to that page as a playlist even if the page does not have a RSS feed. Music is streamed by default but you can jump to any point in the track at any time or download tracks locally.

    Songbird is an extendible player which means you can apply your own skin and add your own take on Songbird's stored data. I would like to see some specialist extensions such as a classical music extension that would explain selected pieces and their key features.

    Next month

    I am currently planning the next SF Tech Session and expect to have another group of startups presenting the week of April 24.

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  2. Mar29

    The cost of commuting to Silicon Valley

    Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft employ tens thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay area including many talented people driving close to 100 miles round-trip every day to work for these big companies. AAA released today their 2006 driving costs report and I decided to run the numbers to associate a conservative cost with a commute to these companies.

    How much would it cost to drive a Toyota Camry to work every day from the city centers of San Francisco, Berkeley, or Alameda? Prices below include conservative costs from AAA for average fuel consumption, maintenance, tires, insurance, license and registration, loan finance charges and depreciation costs. AAA estimates a per-mile cost of $0.49.

    According to Salary.com the median Senior Web Developer in Sunnyvale is paid $99,000. Commute costs from San Francisco would account for about 14.3% of this person's salary after taxes.

    Commute costs

    San FranciscoBerkeleyAlameda
    Average$8,776$10,941$9,192
    Yahoo!$9,393$11,495$9,762
    Microsoft$8,573$10,769$9,012
    Google$8,362$10,558$8,801

    A monthly pass on San Francisco public transit is $45, or $540 a year. Can local startups compete for talent with these multi-thousand person companies? I think so.

    Costs likely higher

    The cost-per-mile used by AAA includes national average numbers that are cheaper than urban centers such as San Francisco where it costs more to insure a car or hire a mechanic. The AAA cost-per-mile number uses last year's gas price of $2.405 a gallon and not the current price of $2.717, a 13% increase.

    Behind the numbers

    Milage includes a roundtrip drive from 4th & Market in San Francisco, University & Shattuck in Berkeley, or Park & Encinal in Alameda including bridge fare. Not included is the two hours one might spend in the car every day when driving with no traffic.

    Yes, I know there are public transit options. Some companies offer a free shuttle either for the entire trip or from train stations. Public transit from the East Bay to Silicon Valley does not seem to exist, but CalTrain is one option from San Francisco.

  3. Mar29

    SF Tech Sessions tonight!

    The next SF TechSession is tonight from 7-9 p.m. at The Westin St. Francis hotel next to San Francisco's Union Square. We'll be on the 32nd floor with free food, drinks, WiFi, and a nice view of the city through some 15-foot floor-to-ceiling windows (might be a deck too). Thanks to Blish.com for providing an amazing venue for this month's meeting.

    Presenters

    1. Skobee, online event planning and local search through your social network. Noam Lovinsky, product guy, will present.
    2. Vast.com, an online classified search engine. Founder and CEO Naval Ravikant will present. Noam is a serial entrepreneur and you may want to chat him up for startup tips.
    3. Songbird, an open-source music engine built on top of Gecko, the browser engine behind Firefox. Think Winamp + Firefox + a whole lot more. (it really whips the networked llama's ass). Founder and CEO Rob Lord will present.
    4. Mozes, contextual bookmarks for your mobile lifestyle. Founder and CEO Dorrian Porter will present.

    Each presentation will last 15 minutes and include live demonstrations of the products. You'll have a chance to talk with the people behind the product, do some research, and learn some new things you might want to write about or integrate into your own company or project.

    A few audience participants will have a chance to stand up and introduce themselves and their project to the crowd towards the end of the event for more efficient mingling. Start thinking of something clever!

    Come for the free food, come for a drink, come for the people, come for the talks, or just come for the view. Please RSVP on the SF Tech Sessions blog to help me help you find a seat and food. The weather report is decreasing showers throughout the afternoon with clear skies tonight.

  4. Mar29

    PodSession: online storage

    In this week's PodSession Om and I talk about online storage and the increased need to backup your digital lifestyle. The launch of Amazon's Simple Storage Service was just the beginning of online storage utilities. Companies such as Amazon help people feel their data is safe with a company that already manages large amounts of data and will be in business for a long while.

    We are starting to see some enterprise-level backup and storage technologies applied to the consumer space. Home computer users are consuming more and more storage space by ripping CD collections, downloading music and movies, and loading large images from their cameras. Lost data means either a lot more work or memories vanished forever, creating new opportunities for a data insurance policy for individuals.

    This week's PodSession is titled Online storage. The podcast is 21 minutes in length, a 9.6 MB download.

  5. Mar27

    Google and Verizon partner to bring yellow pages online

    Verizon's SuperPages.com has partnered with Google to turn the phone company's yellow page advertisers into sponsored listings within Google Local. It's a huge development in a fragmented local search advertising space. Verizon will act as an authorized Google AdWords reseller using its 3,000 local sales people and existing small business portal to connect merchants to a larger audience.

  6. Mar27

    Cablevision tests remote storage DVR

    Cablevision plans to give its more than 2 million digital cable customers access to 80 GB of remote storage for less than $10 a month. Digital cable boxes would receive a software upgrade allowing a subscriber to select favorite programs for recording on Cablevision's servers. You can record two programs simultaneously while watching a previously recorded show.

    These types of services are only the beginning of what broadband providers are able to offer their customers on-demand over a high speed network. In the future there may be a channel produced by the cable company on a specialty subject such as high school sports or cooking and never broadcast but available in a time-shifted environment.

  7. Mar27

    FeedDemon 2.0 raises the bar

    Congratulations to Nick Bradbury on the release of FeedDemon 2.0. Nick calls FeedDemon 2.0 "the best work I've ever done" and as someone who has been following the product since its first beta I have to agree.

    The new version of FeedDemon tracks the feeds you pay the most and least attention to over time, helping you realize who might be most worthy of your 5 minutes of reading time. Stylesheets have received a total overhaul. You can select a default feed reading stylesheet for the entire app as well as custom stylesheets on a per-feed including a photo-specific view using Media RSS and a row of icons above each post to help you add a bookmark on del.icio.us or search for blogs referencing the post on Technorati. You can synchronize your feed list and read/unread items using the NewsGator API and even reach into your Windows Common Feed list to keep all applications on your local desktop in sync as well.

    Nick is an immersive developer who dives right into his product and its user experience. When I first met Nick he was playing with a new Tablet PC to make sure FeedDemon delivered a good experience on that platform. When podcasting started gaining traction Nick took his time adding enhanced enclosure support while he tested out existing software with a variety of MP3 devices and the latest features in Windows Media Player before releasing FeedStation. FeedDemon 2.0 is yet another step in the right direction where Nick took a step back, listened to his users, and created a new application that solved their common frustrations with the feed reading experience and took care of a few problems they did not even know they had.

    Congrats to Nick and the NewsGator team on a stellar release.

  8. Mar26

    Flickr on the cover of Newsweek

    April 3, 2006 Newsweek

    Stewart and Caterina from Flickr are on the cover of the April 3 issue of Newsweek for "putting the 'We' in Web." The article introduces readers to the idea of a participatory web where small teams can enable millions of users to create their own site, community, and data interactions. My favorite quote is at the end of the article:

    The Living Web means that there may be plenty of opportunities to become the next Flickr, and hundreds of start-ups are trying to do just that. At Tim O'Reilly's recent Emerging Technology Conference, it seemed that 1,200 people had signed on to some collectively generated business plan: starting a company in a spare bedroom, outsourcing the programming to some Indian company they found on the Web, getting content from users and then having users organize the content by tagging, pocketing money from Google ads placed on the Web site and, finally, selling the company to Yahoo. (Bad news: Yahoo's Horowitz admits, "We can't buy everyone.")

  9. Mar26

    SF Tech Sessions: communities and new methods of interaction

    SF Tech Sessions is back! This month's event will feature 4-6 companies that may change the way you view search, communities, and online social interaction. All products are from small startup companies who have launched within the last 2 months.

    Details

    Wednesday, March 29
    7:00-9:00 p.m.
    Westin St. Francis hotel
    Alexandra room, 32nd floor
    Union Square, San Francisco

    Full details for the event are available on the SF Tech Sessions blog. Add to iCal

    March SF Tech Sessions Reception area

    I learned a few things from the first SF Tech Sessions events: shorter presentations and more time for socializing and Q&A. Our meeting room features rows of chairs facing a presenter in the front, and ample room for schmoozing towards the back. Participants enjoy having a look at new companies that make them rethink existing ideas. Joyent made last month's participants rethink what information they are willing to share with coworkers in a small business environment and what they would prefer to remain private. Zimbra encourages the display of supplemental information such as a person's contact information or a project's status from within the context of an e-mail message.

    Full information

    This month I have encouraged all presenters to not shy away from technical details. I want developers in the audience to get a full picture and perhaps evaluate an API or two for use in their own projects.

    It's all free! Come check out the view from the 32nd floor of this historic hotel, where the Queen of England once took the best furniture from every room to construct her own master quite and the Soviets started cutting wires on entire floors until they were convinced no one was spying on them. Thanks to digital content marketplace Blish.com for so generously sponsoring this month's event.

    I've already started to plan next month's event. Please contact me if you have a cool new project or startup you are working on that you would like to introduce to more people and gather feedback. Hope to see you Wednesday!

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  10. Mar24

    theOffice, creating the ideal workplace for indie writers

    theOffice street entrance

    I am in west Los Angeles today and dropped by theOffice, a community workspace serving the professional writing community of Santa Monica and surrounding areas. They have put a lot of thought and effort into creating an ideal creative work environment combining elements of a cafe, library, and Feng Shui garden into a place creative professionals feel inspired and focused.

    Background information

    theOffice street sign

    The workspace was founded by writer and director Aleks Horvat in 2004 with charter members such as J.J. Abrams, Jim Uhls, and Mara Brock Akil. A wall-of-fame tracks successful works written in the space. Aleks was working out of cafes or at home, using uncomfortable chairs, and surrounded by noise and interruptions. theOffice was founded to create a quiet new space free of interruptions, surrounded by other like-minded individuals, and with access to everything they needed to be successful writers.

    Bonsai tree

    What is your ideal work environment? The working space here contains a 8-foot bonsai tree and river stones as the centerpiece of a round table and group work area. A bubbling brook creates ambient noise nearby. The edges of the room contain individual desks or you may wish to plop down on a more plush chair with a writing ledge. Since we're in sunny Santa Monica, you can also sit outside on the deck and enjoy the mild weather. I chose a seat on the edge of the room but in a group work environment sitting around the bonsai seems ideal.

    theOffice individual tables

    Every seat has power, an ethernet jack, and ambient WiFi. You can sit in an Aeron chair, wear Bose noise-reducing headphones, and focus on your work. A common library supplies the latest newspapers, trade magazines, industry directories, and reference books. Tea, coffee, water, and espresso drinks are available. The environment is focused on quiet: you must set your cell phone on vibrate, and take any conversations outside. It's located near San Vicente Boulevard and 26th Street in Santa Monica, between two country clubs and near the target market of writers in their 30s and 40s. The surrounding area contains a few small restaurants and shops to provide good food and entertaining work breaks.

    Business plan

    theOffice shuffled their business plan at the beginning of the month to create more recurring revenue and provide more services for its most frequent users. The space had been available on an hourly basis since 2004 but has now moved to a membership plan with either 24/7 access, half day access, or hourly access during less busy night and weekend hours.

    theOffice currently has about 45 members paying monthly dues ranging from $350-$600. Students receive a 20% discount. During my visit there were about 10 people using the space, and I was told that although 24/7 access is a nice feature, few members have taken advantage of their key access so far. Events are held every Monday night to bring together the local writing community and introduce new people to the space.

    My take

    theOffice outside patio

    I decided to visit theOffice to see how their ideas for an inspirational workplace might be applied to an office or coworking environment. I like the variety of work spaces allowing you to choose between soft chair, group table under the tree, square individual desk, or sunshine on the patio. The neon sign out front summarizes the basic features and focus of the space: quiet, coffee, comfort, Internet.

    Members join theOffice for access to all the best amenities of a home office in a quiet and disciplined environment. Screenplay writing and other creative works are often immersive experiences that take a year or two to complete. I spoke with a couple members who told me they view their membership fees as an investment in their personal efficiency and quality of work. Judging from the wall-of-fame and charter members it's obvious that the work environment has already paid off for some writers and new members would like to enable that type of success.

    If people are willing to pay $200 a month for membership to a certain gym to work out for an hour a day, $600 a month for full access to a managed office environment does not seem too bad to me. I would opt for the $350 a month plan since a set 7-hour block every day is more my style.

    If more space was available I would add a few small meeting rooms and perhaps a few small lockers so members could leave their notepads and books overnight. The space is configured for writers but an ideal work environment for geeks would likely include a full-size keyboard and mouse as well as an external LCD screen at select workstations. Technical support and backup would be good geek value-adds at a relatively cheap cost and I would set up an iTunes jukebox for everyone to jam to their favorite tunes.

    Thanks to John and members of theOffice for being kind hosts today. I wish them luck in creating the ideal work environment for individual writers.

  11. Mar23

    Are portals back in fashion?

    In this week's episode of Om and Niall PodSessions Om and I talk about Google Finance, the latest piece of the search company's portal play. According to Hitwise, 10% of Google UK's visitors clicked out to Business and Finance sites last week. Yahoo! Finance received .02% of those clicks. Is Google in denial about its move towards a portal service?

    I liked the new Google Finance, especially the chart overlays and integration with other Google products. Om found the new product lacking a few of his favorite features from Yahoo! Finance such as institutional holdings and insider trading.

    A search company executive recently told me that Google averages 15 searches per user per month. A search engine can focus on growing its user base of searchers or increasing the number of searchers per user. The introduction of auxiliary features such as Google Finance add new launchpads of search activity across Google properties that results in highly targeted and high-revenue advertising.

    We talk about these issues and more in this week's PodSession, Pushing the Portal. The podcast is 19 minutes long, a 9 MB download.

  12. Mar21

    Google Reader adds sharing

    Google Reader users can now share tagged feed items with anyone on the web via Gmail, an Atom feed, JSON, or a view within Google Reader. All you have to do is authorize one or more tags as shared and publish the appropriate URL or JavaScript. The new feature was announced tonight on the Google Reader blog.

    Google reader starred

    You can utilize special tags to enable new feature for yourself or your site. Adding a tag of "blogsidebar" to an item for example could add that item to a link list in your blog's sidebar. A tag of "mom" would queue up the latest link of interest for your mom to read in My Yahoo!. Tag something the name of your business to share with coworkers. There are lots of possibilities to overload the Reader "labels" and create interesting sharing opportunities.

    You can directly request a user's JavaScript output from Google Reader for individual styling and processing.

    Google Reader has taken advantage of its online application status to connect users wherever they would like to consume content. The Google Reader project started with a few team members looking for better ways to share a link blog online and it's now possible for any user to display their own mini-aggregator powered by Google Reader.

  13. Mar20

    Google launches personal finance site

    Google Finance logo

    Google just unveiled Google Finance aimed at private investors. The new service correlates stock quotes, trading volume, executive bios and information, top news, blog posts, and Google-hosted moderated message boards. Check out the information page for GOOG for example.

    The site uses Flash technology to create interactive graphs. You can hover over any data point on the graph for more information and adjust a date-range slider beyond the default 3-day view.

    Blog data from Google Blog Search appears above message board content for selected blog. Given the frequent posts about a given company it makes sense to filter the results to avoid too much noise and Google seems to be filtering by the total number of source links or some other authority metric to determine inclusion in the results. There are three featured blog posts on the Apple Computer page pulled from the last week for example.

    At the time of this post Google listed Google Finance alongside its competitors in OneBox results for AAPL and GOOG.

    My favorite feature is the stock charts with major news stories, price data, and trading volume all overlaid in the same view. You can even drag the chart to the right or left to see more data!

  14. Mar20

    Six Apart announces Chinese partner

    Six Apart is partnering with blog hosting company Bokee to localize and distribute Movable Type in China. Bokee (formerly known as BlogChina) means "great, open minded person" in Chinese.

    Leading Chinese search company Baidu estimates there are 36.82 million blogs in China authored by 16 million unique bloggers as of November 2005. The same study found 658 blog service providers in China and 330 providers with over 1000 registered users. MSN Spaces currently leads the market.

    Bokee has been vocally opposed to the spread of MSN Spaces in China and what one Bokee employee calls a "Microsoft monopoly" of blogs in China due to its agreements with the Chinese government.

    We call on the national monitoring departments to increase their monitoring and supervision of MSN Spaces, especially with respect to their illegal offering of content services in order to restrict its monopolistic practices.

    We call for the vast number of blog service providers and traditional portals to put aside their sectarian interest, and set up Chinese blog service standards and open up the Chinese market in order to oppose Microsoft monopolizing 2.0.

    Bokee laid off reportedly laid off about 1/3 of its workforce the week before Christmas and plans a billion dollar IPO within the year if they are not first bought by Yahoo! or Google for a rumored $200 million.

    China's a tricky business but Movable Type is a good first step into the market for Six Apart due to its hosted nature which places more responsibility for the content on the publisher and not the tool provider.

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  15. Mar16

    GRiD Computing event

    GRiD Compass 1101

    Last night I attended a talk at the Computer History Museum about the early history of portable computing highlighting GRiD Computing as one of the pioneers in the space.

    Some interesting facts:

    • GRiD was one of Silicon Valley's first stealth companies (back in 1981). Most employees did not know what they were working on until after they were hired.
    • Co-founder Dave Paulsen told a story about sourcing parts from all over the world to try and find already manufactured components that could work in a small form-factor PC. They found their electro-luminescent displays while flipping through a Japanese electronics catalog and seeing a panel advertised by Sharp as a light bulb replacement that could fill your whole room with soft light.
    • GRiD laptops were used in space for over a decade. After the Challenger explosion in 1986 the GRiD computers were recovered and still worked!
    • Presidents carried GRiD computers with them in case of nuclear emergencies. It was one of the tools inside "the football." The laptop allowed cabinet officials to leave Washington without fear of being out of touch with their nuclear arsenal.
    Jeff Hawkins business card

    At the end of the talk I had the chance to speak with Jeff Hawkins and check out his GRiD from back in the day. A definite uniquely Silicon Valley type of night.

    Check out my full photoset from the talk, including some of the early marketing materials of GRiD.

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  16. Mar14

    VOIP and mobile integration podcast

    In this week's PodSession Om and I discuss voice and mobile technologies currently available for platform integration. When does it make sense for a web application to add voice or mobile capabilities? What are the costs and benefits?

    Are so called "web 2.0" companies just shinier versions of existing applications? Is anyone actually pushing the envelope and inventing entirely new industries? IP-based voice applications have already changed the way we think about communicating online. Mobile phones are now common tools of daily communication with relatively fast data connections with always-on access to the Web and focused data. Why are we not seeing more integration of voice and mobile into new web applications?

    Google Local and Windows Live Local search products are just starting to launch pay-per-call advertising on their sites, connecting any computer with a paying merchant over a telephone line. Other companies such as Progressive Auto Insurance are integrating support call centers with web applications to help complete sales.

    Now that conference season is in full swing startup companies can walk through the halls of focused gatherings such as VON or CTIA to gather new ideas about product integration across multiple mediums and devices.

    This week's PodSession, VoIP and mobile integration, is 23 minutes long, a 11 MB download.

  17. Mar14

    FeedBurner expands to San Francisco, moves in with Adaptive Path

    FeedBurner just announced the hiring of Don Loeb and its expansion to a San Francisco office. Don also posted an announcement on his blog.

    Don was previously led business at Yahoo!'s personalized media division including My Yahoo!, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Groups, etc.

    FeedBurner's San Francisco office is most likely a rented desk at Adaptive Path, a San Francisco user experience design firm. Adaptive Path rents desks on the second floor of its building to small companies for about $250 a month.

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  18. Mar13

    NewsGator API

    The NewsGator API allows synchronization of feed and item-level data across multiple locations. NewsGator has a few unique features not available in other APIs such as Google Reader, so I will dive right into the unique features.

    SOAP now, REST later

    The NewsGator API is currently offered as a SOAP interface only but Brent Simmons mentioned future plans for REST support during his presentation at last week's Emerging Technology conference.

    Authentication

    An application acts on behalf of a user with a NewsGator account. The account also allows access to NewsGator Online, a web-based aggregator that can be used anywhere.

    Locations

    Each product using the NewsGator API can establish its own unique location setting to allow separate feed lists for different applications and environments. You may have one feed list on your mobile phone, another list of feeds you track at work, and a third set of feeds you track at home for example. Read and unread status can be set for a feed item across multiple locations.

    Centralized updates

    Once a feed list is established any application using the NewsGator API can request all updated items across all feeds since the last update. If two million aggregator clients request updates from your site every half hour but reroute through the NewsGator API each individual aggregator will hit NewsGator's servers instead of your site and NewsGator will poll your feeds for updates on behalf of those two million users. NewsGator communicates the total number of readers subscribed to your feed in the User-Agent field of each request. Feed publishers may ping NewsGator directly to make sure all requesting applications have access to the most up-to-date information.

    Current implementations

    NewsGator owns a portfolio of products that establish a large footprint on the Windows and Mac desktop. FeedDemon is a popular standalone application for Windows owned by NewsGator and will support the NewsGator API in its 2.0 release, currently in its third beta stage. NewsGator Outlook edition integrates with Microsoft Outlook. NetNewsWire is a popular Mac client with millions of users and will support the NewsGator API in its 2.1 release. NewsGator also has a media center aggregator and an online mobile aggregator.

    Given the millions of existing users using NewsGator applications there is a good chance users of other feed aggregators will interface with a NewsGator aggregator and expect a full synchronization experience between applications and devices. NewsGator's single update request for all modified feed items makes it pretty useful regardless, but the user footprint is an added bonus.

    More information

    There is an official NewsGator API blog with more details and sample code. Greg Reinacker, NewsGator's CTO sometimes posts information to his blog that you won't find documented anywhere else.

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  19. Mar12

    Google Reader platform

    Google built a feed platform that is freely available for any user with a Google account. The first implementation of the Google feed platform is the Google Reader lens, already used by thousands of Google users. The Google feed platform is web-based and therefore works with any operating system. It can be used as a pass-through for one feed at a time for small implementations or a full aggregator backend. It's running on the Google's expansive (and expensive) back-end hardware and network, creating fast response times and high reliability.

    Atom 1.0 output

    The Google Reader platform outputs all data in the Atom 1.0 format. This one output makes data extraction as easy as a traversal of one XML markup set for fast presentation using browser-based parsing in JavaScript or more advanced processing using your favorite programming language.

    Enclosures are passed-through directly into the final markup. Any enclosure presented by Google Reader may or may not exist and has not undergone any pre-processing by Google.

    Read and unread status is one of many different pieces of metadata surrounding every exposed item.

    Subscription lists

    The Google Reader platform display's a user's current, past, and inactive subscriptions. You may view details such as when the user subscribed to the feed and when it was last recognized as modified.

    Each user can apply his or her own tags to any feed. A feed about gadgets may be tagged "computers," "electronics," "gadgets," and "toys" for example. Tags allow loose organization of feed data and all Google Reader data is retrievable at the tag-level.

    Relevance

    Google applies relevance to any group of items you would like to retrieve. Relevance is Google's own black box magic that takes into account link activity, word count, and other metrics to help users focus their attention on a smaller subset of items.

    Synchronization

    The Google Reader platform allows the synchronization of all of your feed aggregator information across machines and applications. You can synchronize data such as tags, read status, and even flag status. Developers may authenticate users using stored cookie data, name and password directly in the URL, or via SASL.

    More information

    The Google Reader platform is still in final development and therefore not an officially announced Google developer option. You can track the latest news on the Google Reader blog and read my unofficial Google Reader API documentation for development details.

  20. Mar12

    Windows RSS platform

    The Windows RSS platform is included in Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista, both due out later this year. The platform exposes feed and list data to all Windows applications via a common API, manages enclosure downloads, and applies common security settings to feed data and downloads.

    Common Feed List

    Internet Explorer 7 autodiscovery

    Windows XP and Windows Vista users will soon be using Internet Explorer 7 as their default browser. They may notice a glowing orange button on their toolbar, click it, and start subscribing to feeds exposed on the page. A subscribed feed is added to the Common Feed List, a centralized list of subscriptions available to any application. A user may initiate a subscription inside Internet Explorer but the new subscription is immediately added to other feed aggregators integrated with the Common Feed List back-end such as RSS Bandit or FeedDemon.

    Internet Explorer 7 supports the import and export of feed lists using OPML. Online aggregators may wish to write small applications for Windows to synchronize subscriptions and item status between machines. In the world of Internet Explorer 7 actions such as "Add to My Yahoo!" or "Add to Google" may become a one-time download and localized sync instead of buttons located on multiple site and blogs.

    Download Engine

    Microsoft's feed engine downloads enclosure files using the system-level Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). The service adjusts its bandwidth usage based on the activity of other applications and handles network dropouts and computer restarts without interrupting the file download.

    All downloads are integrated with the system's Attachment Execute Services, a list of allowed and blocked file types. Third-party applications such as antivirus programs and other security programs sometimes adjust these settings to prevent the download of executable files with potentially malicious code execution or files that could potentially carry malicious macros such as Microsoft Office documents.

    By default all feeds have enclosure download turned off. The user can choose to automatically download enclosures and have the technology above kick in.

    Feed Store

    The Windows RSS platform downloads fresh feed content in the background on a regular schedule. Individual items are exposed at the object-level to any application that would like to leverage the data. It is possible to build your own feed aggregator on top of the locally stored folder, feed, item, and enclosure data exposed by the Windows RSS platform. You also have access to the raw XML if you would like to dig directly into the original data.

    New and updated items are marked as unread within the feed store. Applications integrated with the common feed store can toggle this read or unread status for a shared item view across multiple applications.

    More information

    This brief summary will likely be out of date within days of publication. Check out Microsoft's Team RSS blog or the Vista RSS developer center for the latest announcements and updates regarding the Windows RSS platform.

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  21. Mar12

    Feeds as a platform

    Feed aggregator developers currently struggle with multiple data formats, unclean sources, HTTP status handling, and many other complex problems that take time away from actually developing their application. New feed platforms are emerging that will allow developers to leverage the existing work of larger teams that already sweat the small stuff every day, allowing new aggregator developers to focus on creating new experiences on top of feed data to thrill users and deliver requested features quicker and easier than ever before. Microsoft, Google, and NewsGator are three examples of established companies exposing their feed architecture to the outside world to encourage new applications.

    The feed aggregator ecosystem currently faces issues that reduce the adoption of feed reading technologies for new and expert users alike:

    • Many agents hitting the same feeds on regular intervals. As the popularity of feed aggregators grows, will sites be able to handle every subscriber hitting a feed every half hour?
    • Payloads are getting bigger. Audio, photos, and video are becoming increasingly popular data formats accompanying a feed. The number of automatic downloads initiated by aggregators could discourage rich content sharing due to high bandwidth bills for each publisher.
    • Repopulate subscription lists and item status across multiple applications and devices. We interact with feeds on out home computer, work computer, cell phone, and possibly an online aggregator. We don't want to enter each feed for every location or waste time with items we have already read.
    • Too much data, not enough time. Every new feed we add to a subscription list increases the fear that we might not be able to handle the additional attention load.
    • Feed subscription and delivery to the appropriate application are complicated. Modern web browsers currently display feeds using an XSLT skin on top of the data, a good first step, but users want to be able to easily track an information source over time and know they have successfully completed their task.
    • Feeds are created in multiple XML formats (RDF, RSS, Atom, etc) and often contain invalid XML markup and do not conform to their respective feed specifications.

    But wait, there's more! Developers also have to worry about expected best practices for the benefit of users and feed producers.

    • Proper handling of namespaced elements such as Dublin Core, iTunes, Media RSS, and many others.
    • HTTP best practices such as conditional GETs based on Last-Modified and etag values, permanent and temporary redirect handling, and permanently deleted feeds.
    • Secure feed handling. Some feeds are specific to one user or a group of users and employ HTTP authentication and other techniques to restrict access.
    • Import and export of feed lists using OPML or other common formats.
    • Data backup and selective sharing with others.
    • Search the content of your feeds.
    • Search and/or browse a list of feeds to help populate your aggregator with new content.

    Developers of new aggregator applications need to take all of the above into account and either build it themselves or hope there are a few existing code libraries to help them out along the way. Luckily the whole process is becoming easier as feed platforms enter the market to handle complex issues and expose the underlying feed data as local objects.

    I will introduce feed platforms from Microsoft, Google, and NewsGator over the next few posts to illustrate how developers have a new toolset available for their feed applications that will help connect any new application with millions of existing users on multiple platforms.

    Tags:
  22. Mar09

    State of the aggregator

    In the beginning, there was text. Early feed applications such as Netscape's In-Box Direct, PointCast, and Microsoft Active Desktop transformed existing data formats such as a newspaper and its articles, summaries, and full-text and applied traditional publishing thoughts to a new transport medium. Almost 10 years after then introduction of early web feed formats we are just starting to tap into the full potential of feeds as a descriptive data format with rich payloads and more easily discoverable content.

    Desktop aggregation

    The desktop has been the traditional home of feed experiences. Our desktop aggregators are full of text-heavy content (preferably full-text feeds) with a three-pane browsing experience. Heavy payloads -- full item content, audio, video, documents, etc. -- are handed off to default handlers and not rendered in the client. Communication from feed publishers is one-way with few opportunities to participate in a conversation around an item such as comments, sending a private note to the author or editor, or following related items and threads exposed in the feed or through third-parties. We also still struggle with offline access, relying on the operating system's HTML rendering engine to connect to the web when an item is viewed to pull down associated content such as images.

    Aggregators of the future will help bridge these technology gaps by employing and possibly extending new platform technologies both offline and online to create a richer user experience. E-mail, IM, and feed reading are the three applications I use the most every day and I'm therefore motivated to seek out a better experience wherever it may exist.

    There is room for more than one aggregator on every desktop. I currently read general feeds in NewsFire, subscribe to podcasts in iTunes, receive updated photo streams in iPhoto, and watch video episodes in FireAnt. In the future I might have a specialized application or widget showing information from the latest feed data related to earthquakes, weather, or surf conditions complete with rich media such as live camera snapshots or video streams.

    Online aggregation

    Online aggregators provide a consistent cross-platform experience available from any location with access to the Internet. Portals or segmented pages are more likely to provide title-only or summary views of content to save space and direct a user to the original content location for the full article. Destination sites such as Bloglines and Google Reader provide a full-text view in a bare-bones render experience to keep things simple.

    Media centers

    Feeds and their rich content payloads are now an integrated part of the living room experience. Your media center takes advantage of always-on broadband and a typically large screen to display high-resolution images, quality audio, and video episodes of your favorite content. Given a media center's built-in ability to browse time shifted content the latest downloads available from your feeds simply become another line in a navigation interface, placing the latest content from the Internet alongside content recorded from locally gathered media such as TV or radio.

    A media center such as a TiVo learns your preferences and recommends new content based on existing subscriptions. It is not too far of a stretch to imagine a media center that recommends content based not only on what is currently available on your 500 satellite channels but all of the available content in a directory of rich media feeds as well. Imagine getting a preview of The Simpsons before a new episode or additional materials on the show the day after it airs.

    Feed delivery on a media center enables distribution of high-definition content for niche markets directly to interested consumers. I could subscribe to a Real Madrid channel and receive all the video I want on the soccer club even though they are 5000 miles away and not covered on my cable plan.

    Mobile browsers

    Mobile phones are becoming ubiquitous consumption devices of on-demand content. Phones are used to deliver highly targeted content to a 2" screen while you want for the bus, commute to work, or have a few spare minutes before the next meeting. Current mobile feed readers shipped with a phone such as Motorola's Screen3 present timely content in a small ticker-like display on the bottom of the screen. Motorola has chosen specific feed sources for its users delivering up-to-date information about weather, earthquakes, sports teams, and popular news stories every few minutes.

    Later this month Sony Ericsson will ship new phones with customizable feed readers built-in. Any user can now control their own mobile information flow receiving the latest news and alerts while they are on the go.

    Mobile phones are a perfect environment for rich feed payloads such as audio or video. Modern cell networks have average advertised download speeds of 300-500kbps and actual even faster speeds in real-world testing. Download speeds available on an always-connected mobile phone will continue to improve over time even if the user is unaware of the power at their fingertips.

    Conclusion

    We have only just begun to explore the full possibilities of current feed technologies. Rich media enclosures, related content definitions, and well-defined author data open up new possibilities for user interaction and content discoverability. I believe most future uses of syndication technology will occur behind the scenes as a transport layer opening up a common XML parsing format to multiple applications and specialized uses. We've only just begun to change the world of publishing, customization, and personal empowerment.

    Tags:
  23. Mar08

    Windows Live Search updates

    Search icon

    Microsoft introduced a new front-end for MSN Search data last night on Live.com, the new default homepage for Internet Explorer users. The new features improve the search experience for novice users with a more familiar interaction and customization.

    Windows Live Search

    Scrollbars, no next button

    Microsoft found about 60% of their users request more than one page of results for services such as image search. They redesigned the experience, replacing the "next" and "previous" buttons common on other search sites with a with a draggable scroll up or scroll down slider that requests new result sets in the background.

    Windows Live Image Search

    Choose your thumbnail size

    Thumbnails for any image search can be resized on-the fly using a special slider in the results page. The slider and resized images allow you to adjust the number of results you can see in each page view. The new image search also uses a slider to access next and previous data sets.

    Hovering over any image reveals more information such as the dimensions of the image, file size, file name, and location.

    Feed preview

    Every feed search result can now be previewed in a special pane before subscribing to the feed on Live.com.

    Live.com search macros

    Search macros

    The average Windows Live Search user would probably never add search operators but with search macros all they need to do is add a macro and build on top of someone else's complex search.

    More advanced users can setup their own macro for preferred review sites, conservative bloggers, or whatever else is of interest. It's part Rollyo, part OpenSearch, and opens up many advanced features for geeks to help more novice searchers.

    The first set of macros were created by Windows Live Search team members but Brady Forrest of the Search team helped some ETech attendees create their own for inclusion on the site when it opens to the public in a few weeks.

    Tags:
  24. Mar08

    Conference WiFi is a marketing play

    I'm at the Emerging Technology conference in San Diego with some cool new applications and services being announced on stage and in the hallways. The problem is, no one is able to blog about what's happening in real-time due to an almost non-existant network connection (even for presenters wanting to live demo).

    A thought for conference organizers: wireless connectivity is part of your marketing budget. It allows the audience to research products and sponsors, connect to other attendees to arrange meetings and get-togethers, and enables more people to attend knowing they will be able to simply connect back to the office if anything requires immediate attention.

    Great connectivity leads to a bigger worldwide mind share for everyone involved in the conference. Assign a specific sponsor to the WiFi connectivity costs (WiFi by Cisco, Intel Centrino, etc.) and let freedom ring.

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  25. Mar07

    Feed platform presentation: Microsoft, Google, and NewsGator

    As previously mentioned, I will lead a session on Feeds as a Platform at the Emerging Technology conference tomorrow at 1:45 p.m. I will talk about the feed ecosystem, peer into the future a bit, and introduce attendees to three real-world examples of feed platforms.

    1. Windows RSS platform. Jane Kim of Microsoft will present Microsoft's new technologies exposing feeds at the operating system level. You will see feed handling in action on the latest builds of Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 and learn why they matter to both users and developers.
    2. Google Reader API. I will introduce the Google Reader API and how it may be used across platforms to display feeds and store personalized information in a central location.
    3. NewsGator. Brent Simmons will discuss feed synchronization and centralized parsing agents from a developer point-of-view. Brent has implemented the Bloglines Sync API, .Mac synchronization, and most recently the NewsGator API for the millions of NetNewsWire users. Brent will show off the latest build of NetNewsWire and discuss his first-hand experiences with feed platforms and synchronization.

    The session may be recorded by the conference organizers and I will post slides and pointers in a separate post after the presentation.

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  26. Mar06

    AIM opens to developers

    AIM logo

    AOL Instant Messenger is now officially available to external developers for custom presence, add-ons, and full integration of AIM into existing applications. I signed up for a developer key and I've implemented my AIM presence to my contact page as a first step. The new AIM developer features open up new methods of integration for everyone from the independent publisher all the way up to big corporations.

    AIM Presence

    You can now integrate your AIM status into web pages and other applications to let people know when you are online. You can also communicate your idle status, away message, and if you are currently logged on from a mobile device.

    AIM Plugins

    It is now possible to add your own plugin or widget to the AIM application. Think of it as a sidebar widget but within the AIM application and its defined social network.

    AIM Client

    The AIM Custom client is the most exciting. Create your own AIM bot, integrate buddy lists into an application, and request an entire social network using the AIMcc libraries. Starting with just one screenname you could potentially request every buddy and associated buddy profile, including things like location and URL to create social search applications defined by your predefined list of contacts.

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  27. Mar03

    Feeds as a platform talk at ETech

    I will be at O'Reilly's sold-out Emerging Technology conference next week learning about the latest developments in the online technology world and talking to a lot of smart people. If you are at the conference you should come to my Feeds as a Platform presentation on Wednesday, March 8, at 1:45 p.m.

    I will talk about new trends in the syndication space and the technologies that make it all possible. What will the syndication space look like at the end of 2006? What are the underutilized applications of the technology primed for the most growth? What new products and services are emerging that will connect and organize more information and focus your attention?

    If I don't blog for a few days I'm probably busy putting together a 45-minute presentation, leaving room for a few surprise guests and announcements!

  28. Mar02

    Automatic favorites import using browser history

    TailRank launched a bunch of new features today focused on improving the meme tracker's ability to recommend new sources and hot posts. Users can now have their favorite weblogs automatically recognized without the need for relatively confusing terms such as OPML, RSS, or blogrolls. Favorite sites are imported using a user's browser history. I think this technology will be common across many sites in the next 6 months, and here's how you do it.

    The user clicks on an "Auto Configure" button that initiates the magic. Clicking the button loads a list of links that are potentially sites visited by the user. In TailRank's case the top X blogs are loaded into an iFrame hidden from view using CSS height and width values of zero.

    You can then cycle through the list of links using JavaScript, identifying the links with an anchor pseudo-class of visited. Pass each visited link back to the server and you now have a list of URLs stored in a user's browser history.

    It's quick and easy for the user with a low barrier to entry.

    Tags:

Niall Kennedy Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »

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