FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are now free
NewsGator is giving away desktop clients FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator Inbox as part of a new plan to capture more enterprise revenue.
Feed aggregators
145 posts filed under this category.
Google Feed API
Google Reader finally has its first official API. Any developer in the world can request the entire history of a web feed from Google’s geo-distributed server cloud in a normalized response for inclusion in their websites or products. I’ve been hoping for such an API since I first deconstructed the Google Reader backend in December 2005. Most users will likely interact with the Google AJAX Feed API through a JavaScript library included on their site or a pre-configured badge generated on the Google site. The Feed API wrapper is part of a larger effort by Google to extend its search…
Two feed syndication talks at Web 2.0 Expo
The Web 2.0 Expo officially kicked off yesterday at the Moscone conference center in San Francisco, bringing together thousands of web technologists to learn new things and market new web products. I participated in conference planning as a program chair, selecting a range of topics to educate technical product managers on the latest web technology, specifically in the Web 2.0 Fundamentals track. I’m leading two sessions at the conference on feed syndication technologies and I’ll be in attendance all three days if you’d like to say hello. Intermediate to Advanced Syndication Web frameworks and software packages now feature basic…
Nokia releases H.264 video podcatcher
Nokia announced a new mobile feed reader focused on video today at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona. The Nokia Video Center comes pre-installed on new Nokia Series 60 devices such as the newly announced N95 and N93i but is also available as a separate download for compatible devices. You can load videos onto the phone through your home computer or receive updates over-the-air at HSDPA speeds or using open WiFi while you’re on the go. The Video Center software supports H.264 videos, meaning videobloggers have even more reasons to create specially formatted and mini-sized (320×240) versions of their show…
Yahoo! Pipes remixes the syndicated web
Yahoo! released Yahoo! Pipes tonight, a visual editing interface for web feed manipulation and reconstruction. The 5-person Pipes team, part of the Yahoo! TechDev incubation group, spent about 5 months developing the product to help people better remix the syndicated content they find online. Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results. You might splice a feed of your latest bookmarks on del.icio.us with the latest posts from your blog and your latest photographs posted to Flickr. You might automatically translate your favorite news sources to your native language, or only…
Sony adds RSS to televisions
Sony’s latest HDTVs will support an optional component capable of streaming Internet video and downloading content defined using RSS syndication. The BRAVIA Internet Video Link is a small optional module attached to the back of your HDTV and connected to your home broadband network over Ethernet. Price and availability are still unannounced, but the first televisions supporting the new module will be available this Spring. The BRAVIA Internet Video Link operates independently without the need for a separate gateway computer on your network. It uses the Xross Media Bar (XMB) interface already present on a PSP to browse feed…
Apple Dashcode developer preview available for download
Apple released a developer beta version of Dashcode, a widget development environment included in its upcoming Leopard operating system. The preview software is available for Tiger until July. (via Brent Simmons) Dashcode lets anyone design a new widget through a drag and drop interface or by directly editing the underlying code. Bundled widget templates include a countdown timer, latest items from a web feed, web feed single item view, podcast, photocast, and an activity monitor. Dashcode will debug your Dashboard widget code placing all of your files within the appropriate package and generates additional nice touches such as a…
Delivering enclosures to IE7 and Windows
The feed syndication platform built-in to Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista may fail to download media enclosures larger than 15 MB. It’s a feature, not a bug, designed to prevent over consumption of computer bandwidth. The automatic download engine built-in to Windows (BITS) tries to queue up audio, video, or other enclosure content in a user’s subscription updates. It tries to be polite and not consume all available bandwidth, throttling back its consumption while higher priority tasks such as e-mail and web browsing receive new data. The download engine prefers to download large files in pieces, requesting an achievable…
Brands will be widgetized, but who is the author?
Companies who embrace widgets may be less likely to suffer phishing attacks and bloated bandwidth consumed by third-party creations. Popular content will eventually find its way into widget platforms by scrape or by frame, and it’s best to get ahead of the potential pitfalls and embrace the new medium. Two types of widgets have been on my mind this weekend as a potential issue for companies who fail to ride the widgets wave. Protecting user information Sites with personal user data placed behind a username and password may be subject to new types of phishing attacks from the widget web….
Feed publishing best practices
Web feed syndication is made up of two base vocabularies: RSS 2.0 and the Atom Syndication Format. These base vocabularies are extended using namespaces to create a common set of expressions for your web feed data. In this post I’ll walk through some best practices for publishers syndicating their data via web feeds. Should I use RSS or Atom? The RSS 2.0 syndication format has been around for about four years and over that time it has been used by web publishers large and small to represent their data for syndication. The New York Times publishes its top stories via…
Declaring alternate web content for searchability and discoverability
Web authors may declare alternate versions of a single web page, exposing additional languages available or various file formats. HTML documents express these relationships using the link element in the document header. Alternate language A single Wikipedia article about “search” might have alternate representations and translations, such as “buscar” in Spanish, “suche” in German, “rechercher” in French, etc. A search engine or web browser software can discover the availability of these alternate document versions if declared by the publisher. The example markup above advertises an alternate version of example.com available in Arabic…
EmTrace WidgetStation
A Korean company specializing in smartphone development is releasing a hardware device next year focused on widgets. The WidgetStation from Emtrace Technologies has both a mono and color LCD and receives content update over Ethernet and/or USB connections. It’s a mini computer with an ARM processor, NAND flash memory for local storage, and RAM. The mono LCD is designed for long-term display items such as a clock or weather while the color LCD displays built-in and customizable content from the Internet or your desktop, including support for audio playback. Emtrace’s past developing for smartphones in a mobile-heavy culture such…
Google Personalized Homepage for your domain
Users of Google Apps for Your Domain can now add a homepage with a custom set of configured gadgets for their users. The new feature lets companies configure mail messages, calendar data, specialized web feeds, and more as their employees’ portal to the web. The group customization feature was previously only available to large partnerships such as Dell and Gateway. The Apps for Your Domain program launched in August and includes custom branded and custom addressable access to Google Mail, Talk, Calendar, webpage creation, and now your own start page to bring it all together. The Google search box…
Speaking at PubCon on Tuesday
I’ll be in Las Vegas early next week speaking at PubCon on feed syndication best practices. The session takes place from 10:15-11:30 a.m. on Tuesday if you are attending the search conference. I have not been to Las Vegas in a few years so I’ll be checking out new pieces of grandeur at the Wynn, new Caesars Palace, Treasure Island, etc. Hopefully there will be lots of search geeks in attendance leading to interesting conversations….
Preparing your feeds for IE7
Internet Explorer will be released in just a few weeks, pushed to Windows XP users as a critical update. The Windows RSS Platform ships as part of IE7 and will likely become the most popular desktop aggregator by the end of the year. Are you ready for the switchover? There are changes to CSS and JavaScript handling and an OpenSearch search box you should probably code against if you would like quick and easy access to your site and its archive. I’m mainly interested in the changes in feed syndication so I’ll walk through some areas that might trip…
NetRatings finds 40% of online Britons use news feeds
A study by Nielsen//NetRatings found 40% of Britons receive automatic news feeds to their browser or desktop but 69% had never heard of Really Simple Syndication. About 15% of the people surveyed have heard of an iPod but are not sure what it is. A three-page PDF summarizing the study is available from NetRatings. The use of acronym’s caused a marked drop in user knowledge. 29% of those surveyed knew what “IM” meant but 86% knew the term “instant messaging.” The average online Briton now owns 4-5 digital or networked devices. 3G mobile phones were more common than iPods and…
Netvibes 2.0
Netvibes pushed their latest release live tonight, unveiling new visual designs and a few new modules. Founder and CEO Tariq Krim refers to the release as Netvibes 2.0 on the official Netvibes blog. The new version of Netvibes features themes, video search, blog search, a MySpace module, and more. You can choose your favorite color backdrop ranging from gray to pink. It would be cool if I could set a theme by tab, such as making my soccer tab blue to match Chelsea but keep my other tabs green. The new MySpace integration allows you to track the latest information…
Google Reader courts the Gmail crowd
Google Reader has launched a major update to its web front-end about a year after its initial launch, redesigning its online feed aggregator to create a feed reading experience that should feel natural to users of Gmail. New features include a shared clippings service, better read/unread tracking, and the ability to share feed items easily over e-mail. The coolest new feature is Google Reader’s continuous scroll of feed items combined with automatically selecting each feed item as you move around the news flow. You’ll find a lot more access keys in the new Reader, mapped to the common Gmail…
RealNetworks releases RealTime feed aggregator
RealNetworks just launched a news aggregation site powered by syndicated content. The new RealTime site, toolbar, and screensaver provide a customized news reading experience complete with feed discovery, recommendations, and the ability to interact with subscriptions online or on the desktop. The new software will be promoted and bundled with RealPlayer, a desktop application with millions of installed users. Website visitors can customize their feed subscriptions using a cookie store or create an account to persist the data to the desktop or across multiple machines. Feed search and discoverability is powered by Feedster. The site is running Apache Coyote,…
NewsGator syncs Windows RSS platform into its cloud
NewsGator just released NewsGator Desktop Sync in beta. The Windows application sits in your desktop tray and keeps your feeds, folders, and item read states synchronized between NewsGator Online and the Windows RSS Platform. NewsGator Online may be viewed in a web browser or synchronized to your mobile phone, Mac, Windows Media Center, or other applications hooked into NewsGator Online. NewsGator Desktop sync connects Windows PCs running the Windows RSS Platform present in Internet 7 and above. Synchronization is like a personal teleporter for your feed data, breaking up your data into many tiny bits capable of being reassembled wherever…
Authenticated and private feeds
Some syndication feeds are not meant to be displayed for the world to see. Our everyday lives contain private and confidential data we wouldn’t want anyone else to see, and especially not search. There are a few options for trying to keep things private in your feed aggregator but the implementations require proper coding and privacy from all implementors. Examples of private feeds intended for 1:1 communication include bank balances, e-mail notifications, project status, and the latest bids on that big contract. Data in the wrong hands could be dangerous, and many companies will stay away from the feed syndication…
Expressing threads and comments in feeds
A feed entry is not a silo, but often connected to other entries in the feed world. In this post you will learn how to express relationships between data using RSS, Atom, and common namespaces. Comment count Reading a feed entry can sometimes evoke action in the form of commentary. Readers often become writers, leaving comments attached to a post or article. Popular technology news site Slashdot has had an active commenting community for years, and created a namespaced element to express the total number of comments associated with a specific item. 42 The above example uses the slash module…
Feed syndication beyond blog updates
Many people in the technology world view the world of RSS, RDF, and Atom as a way of outputting blog content and reading the latest information in a feed aggregator. While that simplified view is true, the full world of feed syndication is a bit more complex. Syndication feeds are extremely popular expressions of structured XML. The popularity of content production and consumption using feeds has resulted in widespread deployment of parsers able to turn something simple such as a title, publication date, and a body of text into an easily displayed message, communicating recent updates and atomic changes in…
Yahoo! Mail enters public beta
The new Yahoo! Mail has entered public beta, incorporating many features from Oddpost into a new PHP front-end. The new Yahoo! Mail features a two-pane interface for reading feeds in one scrollable page. Yahoo! Mail product manager Ethan Diamond told Richard MacManus “the [feed reading] feature is kinda in stealth mode; we are not drawing much attention to it.” Yahoo! Mail will auto-subscribe users to “the most popular feeds across the Yahoo! network”, adding a few feeds to Yahoo! Mail’s user base of over 250 million users. The Yahoo! Mail feed view is built on-top of the My Yahoo! feed…
Microsoft Max feed aggregator
Microsoft just released a new desktop feed aggregator, codename Max. Max features news displayed in a newspaper layout and two-pane interface, a bit different approach than many other aggregators on the market. MSN Filter is built-in, helping you follow the hottest news in lifestyle, music, TV, sports, technology, and movies. You can share your favorite feed items with the Filter community to help influence the recommended reading of others. Microsoft Max is available for Windows XP SP2 and above (including Media Center). It takes advantage of some of the latest hardware and software, including .NET Framework 3.0 RC1 and…
Six Apart acquires Rojo Networks
Blogging company Six Apart has acquired online feed aggregator Rojo Networks. Rojo technologies will be integrated with the Vox blogging tool allowing users to browse updated content and create more blog posts. Rojo co-founder Kevin Burton confirmed the news on his blog this morning. A press release from Six Apart names former Rojo CEO Chris Alden as executive vice president and general manager of Movable Type and former CTO Aaron Emigh as executive vice president and general manager of core technologies. Chris Alden is the fifth general manager of Movable Type in the last year. The press release is…
NewsGator Enterprise 1.4 adds desktop client sync
NewsGator released version 1.4.1 of its enterprise feed management server yesterday afternoon. Users of the new version can now use NewsGator desktop clients FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, or Inbox to interact with their feeds. Much better than a corporate intranet page in my opinion, but it’s good to give people choices. The new version also has better support for detecting and highlighting enclosures, placing files into special folders such as “My Podcasts.” Hopefully new products and updates to enterprise feed readers will create a new market of viewers for the blogosphere, connecting a larger population with automated news delivery….
OS X Leopard includes feed platform?
The developer preview of OS X 10.5 “Leopard” includes an integrated feed syndication platform with Bonjour integration according to a message board posting from a WWDC attendee. The software was distributed to all conference attendees and should be available on your favorite file-sharing network shortly. A new framework is included for publishing and subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds, including complete RSS parsing and generation. Local feeds can be shared over Bonjour zero-configuration sharing and discovery. The new framework would provide an easy interface for Mac developers to include feed syndication features inside their products and share user data across…
Leaving Microsoft
I am leaving Microsoft to start my own company. My last day at Microsoft is next Friday, August 18. It’s uncertain whether Microsoft will continue the feed platform work I started, but it’s some good stuff so I hope they do. RSS is the internet’s answer to the notification scenarios we’ve discussed and worked on for some time, and is filling a role as “the UNIX pipe of the internet” as people use it to connect data and systems in unanticipated ways. I joined Microsoft in April excited to change the world and build an Internet-scale feed platform to power…
Wall Street Journal launches personal homepage
The Wall Street Journal launched a new personalized homepage with Dow Jones content modules as well as customized content from any RSS feed. The new site uses Yahoo! UI Widgets extensively, the first time I have seen the libraries on a high-profile site. My WSJ does not seem to currently support Atom 1.0 feeds….
Spliced feed networks with ads
Brad Feld blogged yesterday about a new FeedBurner effort to place ads on more feeds through the creation of aggregated feed networks. A single curator selects a few feed URLs to create a mega feed for a topic or musing. FeedBurner sells targeted ads inside of the aggregated feed and its various forms of syndication — HTML, RSS/Atom, JavaScript widget, etc. — on a CPM basis. Who other than FeedBurner gets paid for these ad impressions? It seems like another attempt to mine the seemingly free gold laying on the riverbed named user-generated content. The idea isn’t much different than…
Black Hat presentation exposes RSS and Atom risks in the wild
Robert Auger and Caleb Sima of security firm SPI Dymanics gave a 50-minute security briefing on RSS and Atom feed vulnerabilities at yesterday’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Their talk, Zero Day Subscriptions: Using RSS and Atom feeds As Attack Delivery Systems, detailed how many blogging systems and feed aggregators do not block against malicious code insertion by third parties and often run at elevated permission levels on a user’s machine, exposing an entire operating system to a potential scripting attack. I wasn’t there, but News.com summarizes some of the topics covered in the talk. Auger listed Bloglines, RSS…
Google Reader observed namespace data
Mihai from the Google Reader team just posted some interesting data about observed namespaces across all feeds tracked in their system. The namespace data provides information not only about popular ways of expressing data, but also gives insight into blog software market share within a sample such as Google Reader subscriptions. Dublin Core as the top namespace is not too surprising. What jumps out is the number of feeds using the default configuration on a variety of platforms, giving a glance into market share. Blogger – 12% FeedBurner – 4% Windows Live Spaces – 4% LiveJournal – 2.5% Technorati and…
Windows Live Feed Platform has a blog
I’ve been working on an online feed syndication platform at Microsoft since late-April, and now the project finally has a blog. I decided to start the conversation by discussing some of the key concepts and ideas behind the project, and some of its planned features. The first post focuses on synchronization, sharing, and portability. Is it possible to develop a product or platform in the open? Partially. I won’t disclose what’s shipping when, or what product will be first up for integration, but I can be open about our approach to some common problems and expose some integration points for…
FeedBurner acquires Blogbeat
Feed statistics and advertising company FeedBurner has acquired web page tracker Blogbeat for an undisclosed sum. Blogbeat is located in Raleigh-Durham, giving FeedBurner a presence on the east (web stats), center (hq), and west (bizdev) in the U.S.. Blogbeat tracks visitors to a web page using a JavaScript placed on each site page. FeedBurner is able to provide similar tracking through its FeedFlare service but had not yet built a front-end allowing publishers to view the data. The acquisition of Blogbeat will allow FeedBurner to offer publishers a more complete view of their site, posts, and subscriptions by tracking…
IE7 RSS adds mark all read, refresh at will
Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 is now available and includes some new feed reading features for users who like to browse their feed items in the browser. The new beta includes a refresh all option, mark all feed items read, and a few other final tweaks on the path to ship. Sometimes it’s not fun to obey the machine and its update schedule. Advanced information hungry readers can now update all feeds at once, grabbing the latest content before disconnecting from the Internet or to be absolutely sure you’re caught up on all your feeds. You can now mark a…
Four million Netvibes users
French personal homepage company Netvibes has amassed over 4 million users in its first 9 months of operation according to founder and CEO Tariq Krim. Tariq mentions the user numbers about two minutes into a video interview with CNET News.com. The site picked up over 15,000 visitors in its first week of operation. Close to half of Netvibes’ users are in the United States. Netvibes users can configure their homepage without logging in so it’s unclear if the 4 million users are non-expired cookied users or actual user accounts. Either way, keep the user numbers in mind when looking at…
Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard
I’ll be looking at World Cup schedules every day for the next month, but a few people at Microsoft put together a small application named Soccer Scoreboard to track your favorite team, group, and results from your Windows desktop. It even has a RSS aggregator built-in so you can follow along with the latest news about Rooney’s foot or whatever you’re into. Game times are displayed in your local time and the application is localized to close to 20 languages. Here’s a short list of soccer feeds from around the world if you’d like to add them to Soccer Scoreboard…
URL shortcuts for feed syndication specs
Want an easy way to jump to the specifications of your favorite web feed technologies? Me too! I created a few URL shortcuts to eliminate the need for bookmarks and provide a new and memorable way to introduce people to specs and standards. Add a subdomain before FeedSpecs.com and you just might find what you’re looking for. atom.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the Atom Syndication Format IETF spec. rdf.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the RSS 1.0 spec. rss.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the RSS 2.0 spec. gdata.FeedSpecs.com redirects to Google’s gData spec. itunes.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the Apple podcasting spec mediarss.FeedSpecs.com redirects to Yahoo’s Media RSS spec….
Mark Fletcher leaves Bloglines
Another day, another startup opportunity. Mark Fletcher has left Ask and is undoubtedly working on his next startup. Mark’s company, Bloglines, was acquired by Ask 16 months ago in February 2005. Officially Mark is leaving to “spend time with family.” In reality he is working on his next startup, assisting entrepreneurs in the valley, and perhaps investing some angel money as well. Tags: bloglines…
Ask Blog Search launches
Ask.com unveiled its blogs and feeds search offering tonight using index data captured from Bloglines subscriptions. Users can search for feeds (good for subscription suggestions) or individual posts sorted by relevance, recency, or popularity and scoped anywhere from the last hour to the first time a user added the feed to Bloglines. The new offering is most similar to Yahoo’s feed search based on the My Yahoo! feed index. Ask’s relevance search is based on the ExpertRank algorithm and a few other pieces of proprietary secret sauce. Most recent is a reverse chronological sort for the search term. Popularity…
FeedShow and RemoteAds
FeedShow is an online RSS aggregator from France hoping to create a business around splitting advertising money with feed publishers. A publisher may opt-in to the advertising system and display up to two contextual advertisements alongside their feed. FeedShow receives a 50% split of the advertising revenues from publishers participating in the program. FeedShow created a new RSS namespace allowing feed publishers to define their ad provider, account number, and additional provider data such as an AdSense channel. While ads alongside e-mail created new businesses and accounts for a large percentage of private e-mail usage today, feed publishers seem…
Google Reader Mobile
Google Reader Mobile is now available on your mobile phone. The pages are served using XHTML 1.0 for mobile, including access keys for each list item. The mobile reader is a good blend of what you would like to configure on your desktop but still access on a more limited input device such as a mobile phone. The mobile interface is purposefully barebones but utilizes features made possible by the full desktop experience such as browsing tagged posts….
Mark Fletcher presentation at Startup SIG
Mark Fletcher spoke about his experience starting ONElist and Bloglines at this month’s SDForum Startup SIG in Palo Alto. Mark has given a similar presentation at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and at Startup School, but if you are not in California you might have missed his advice for starting your own company while moonlighting and being super-cheap. Mark’s last corporate job was with set-top box maker Diba which was eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems in July 1997. He started working on a new company, ONElist, on the side, funded by a $5,000 bonus check for its first six…
Brightcove adds videoblogs to TIVo
Video publishers using Brightcove will soon be able to reach over 400,000 broadband-enabled TiVo boxes as early as next month. Videobloggers using Brightcove can expose their content to TiVo users and collect some additional advertising revenue. Internet TV is easily mixed with content major networks. Users will watch content unaware if it took place from 2-2:30 p.m. or if it was an enclosure in a feed. Very cool. Tags: brightcovetivo…
Firefox 2.0 adds new feed handling
The latest nightly builds of Firefox 2.0 (Bon Echo) include new XML parsers and feed tools for an improved sbuscription experience. The new feed processor provides a more user-friendly display of a a feed and passes the appropriate subscription data to other desktop applications, online aggregators, or Firefox’s own Live Bookmarks feature. The new feed handling contains three specific parts, as outlined by product lead Ben Goodger last week in an e-mail to the Camino developers list. A feed sniffer to determine if the loaded content contains a feed, regardless of the MIME type returned by the publisher’s servers….
NewsGator error blanks out feed content
Another weekend, another NewsGator news item of fun. This morning the NewsGator servers decided to replace the content of feed items with the item’s link. It’s more than a bit annoying and reminds us how updates from the cloud can go wrong and you are trusting your content will be delivered by the proxy in a timely and accurate manner. Did the proxy parse the feed correctly? Does the central database have the latest items available for its subscribers? Did it change the content in any way? Did the client software change its refresh rate to lower the burden…
Helio on Top feed reader
Helio just launched, and every phone has a feed reader combined with unlimited data service. The reader is named “Helio on Top,” displaying new messages on the bottom third of your screen as they come in. Selecting the message displays the full article and you can also browse through three items or channels at a time. Helio on Top is graphically very similar to Motorola’s Screen3 reader. I like the small square images on the left of each alert. Given the tiny screen it’s important for these images to add context but also create a more comporting feeling that…
Nokia Series 60 podcatcher
Nokia plans to release a podcast client for its latest smartphone lineup in early July. The application takes advantage of 3G cellular data networks and/or nearby WiFi hotspots to deliver new audio content to your phone right after it’s published. Users can search for podcasts but it’s not clear who is providing the directory and search content for Nokia. Tags: nokiaseries60…
Firefox and IE share feed sniffer
Ben Goodger just blogged about feed discovery in Firefox 2.0. He was able to use the same feed sniffing techniques as Internet Explorer 7, making the feed world a bit simpler for both users and publishers. Tags: firefoxie7…
Sony PSP system update includes Flash, AAC support
Sony updated its system software for the PlayStation Portable last night. System update 2.7 includes support for Flash content inside the browser, AAC audio playback, and channel-level RSS settings. AAC support means the PSP might soon support QuickTime chapters, allowing podcasters to add images and descriptive text to individual segments. Flash 6 limits the functionality of new multimedia features such as streaming audio and video but it should work fine within websites using Flash for navigation. Tags: pspsonypsp…
Google GData
Google’s GData format is a” new protocol based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0.” It also includes OpenSearch elements. It’s too late in the day for me to dig into the format right now, but you might enjoy having a look….
FeedBurner adds e-mail subscriptions
FeedBurner just announced FeedBurner Email, allowing readers to subscribe to your feed via e-mail. Most Internet users are familiar with e-mail but a feed reader is a completely foreign concept. They live within Outlook and have an efficient work flow governed by rules-based sorting and alerts. This new feature provided by FeedBurner helps a feed publisher reach more readers in their favorite method of delivery. E-mail subscriptions to a feed is nothing new, even for FeedBurner customers. The company has partnered with FeedBlitz and more recently Squeet to provide e-mail subscriptions in the past, and both companies remain an option…
Google Toolbar adds feed subscriptions
The latest version of Google’s Firefox toolbar adds support for feed subscriptions to online aggregators with just one click. Users are able to choose from a list of five popular online aggregators as well as Firefox’s own Live Bookmarks option. The icon was located right below the address bar feed icon in my Firefox window and seems like the least confusing place for the button even though it’s odd to see two options. I was able to choose between Bloglines, Google Personalized homepage, My Yahoo!, NewsGator Online, and Pluck. It would be nice to provide advanced users with the…
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…
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. 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…
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. Tags: feedburner…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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. 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. Google Reader API. I will introduce the Google…
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…
Continued interests
I’ve been digging into a few new areas of interest over the past few months I feel still need improvement in search, discovery and tracking. I’ve spoken about most of these topics in my podcast series with Om, but it’s worth mentioning again in text. I’m interested in continuing my work in these areas and perhaps helping to solve some existing problems. Feeds We have RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0, the world is starting to understand how syndicated content makes sense, but I don’t see a lot of future thinking for handling multiple locations, personas, and personalized content. Advertising is…
Story of Google Reader
I had lunch today with the Google Reader team and learned a bit more about the group, their success and challenges, and how new projects at Google are sometimes formed. This is the story of how a side-project intended for someone’s blog became a feed aggregator integrated into one of the largest Web properties in the world. It all started with a love of blogging. Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell were both members of the Blogger team and working on different ways to trick out their personal blogs. Jason kept various blogs including a link blog and wanted a way…
Feed exclusion using categories
Many current and future feed publishers create content targeted at individuals for personal use and are not meant for widespread consumption. You may have a customized feed from Netflix, FeedBurner, or WordPress.com to track your movie queue, subscriber count, or blog stats respectively. Some feeds offer privacy through obfuscated URLs and others are just a one-time token exchange at the time of subscription. Given the current merged back-ends of online search aggregators with search and other methods of open discovery, how can a feed publisher opt-out of a public index? One solution using existing element sets may be to overload…
Google Toolbar API
Google Toolbar version 4 allows developers to create custom buttons using a custom XML descriptor and extended functionality using RDF, RSS, and Atom feeds. The Google toolbar button API can be used to display the latest entry titles from a feed, execute a keyword or URL search, or continuously communicate data at a glance. I created custom buttons for this blog and Technorati. The Google Toolbar can now serve as a feed reader for any feed with a custom Google Toolbar icon. You can even specify in your button file a different icon you would like to display when new…
Exclusive: Google to offer feed API
Google plans to offer a feed reader API to allow third-party developers to build new views of feed data on top of Google’s backend. The new APIs will include synchronization, feed-level and item-level tagging, per-item read and unread status, as well as rich media enclosure and metadata handling. Google Reader PM Jason Shellen and engineer Chris Wetherell both confirmed Google’s plans after I posted my reverse-engineering analysis of the Google Reader backend. The new APIs will allow aggregator developers to build new views and interactions on top of Google’s data. Google currently has at least two additional Google Reader views…
Google Reader API
Documentation of the unreleased Google Reader API for feed syndication proxies and account access.
Bloglines 3.0
Bloglines switched it’s user-agent from “Bloglines 2.1” to “Bloglines 3.0-rho” on Tuesday afternoon. My guess is that “rho” are the initials of a Bloglines search engineer who pushed his test code live without changing the user-agent but there could be some big changes coming in near future. If you are a FeedBurner user you may have noticed a large drop in your subscriber statistics over the past day (hat tip: jasonspage). I just heard back from Dick Costolo, CEO, and learned that FeedBurner had previously ignored this Bloglines user-agent as it was just a development test but they will…
My Yahoo! feed API
Yahoo! has developed a backend infrastructure that can be easily deployed across various applications online or on the desktop with full synchronization and feed parsing handled on its servers. Developers could tap into the Yahoo! backend and develop new feed-aware applications quickly and easily on a robust platform already used by millions of users. Yahoo! just needs to publicize the code and make sessions a bit easier but I reverse engineered their code and I’ll give you a primer. Aggregator developers spend a lot of time dealing with issues such as proper parsing, feed storage, and at later stages…
Answering Scott Gatz
Scott Gatz of Yahoo! poses a few questions on his blog that came up during a private dinner Monday night. I think some of the questions already have answers so I’ll post them here. It’s a bit feed geeky and may have an intended audience of about 20 people. No index flag. We need a way to mark an RSS feed as “OK to aggregate, but don’t show in search results.” For publishers who output a different feed per user, you don’t want to see 100 different feeds that are basically the same thing. I think the robots meta tag…
FeedBurner adds 7 pieces of flair
FeedBurner introduced FeedFlare this morning, a new way to easily add information to the bottom of your post content. FeedBurner creates small GIF files — about 300 bytes each — for each feature allowing supplementary information about the post to be updated without changing an item’s read status in an aggregator. FeedFlare launched with the following 7 features: E-mail a link to this post to a friend or colleague. E-mail the author of the post. This feature only works if you have already have defined the author’s e-mail address somewhere in the feed such as managingEditor element in RSS or…
Rich RSS beyond text
I just posted the latest episode of Om and Niall PodSesssions to our podcast site. This week Om and I talk about the possibilities of RSS beyond text and blogs as content such as photos, music, movies, and more are delivered using RSS and other syndication formats. I have been playing around with some of the new broadband RSS services on my TiVo and thinking about new methods of content delivery to the home. Broadband access has been sold as an instant-on service available anytime you wish to interact and retrieve information. I believe the next wave of services will…
Syndicate Conference San Francisco
I am a panelist for Searching the Syndisphere at next week’s Syndicate conference in San Francisco. The panel will discuss different approaches to indexing and surfacing syndicated content, business models, emerging trends, and other topics chosen by the moderator. If you would like to attend the two day conference you can save 30% using a discount priority code of SPKDEC. A two day pass is $836.50 and a one day pass is $437.50 with the discount code applied. Tags: atom, rss, syndicatesf, syndication…
PodSession on blogs, RSS, and advertising
The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. Om and I sat down at his apartment last week to talk about blogs, RSS, and advertising. Om asked most of the questions, focusing the discussion about how to make the right choices in blogging software and services to become a better blogger. Full show notes are available on the Om and Niall PodSessions site. This week’s podcast is 21 minutes in length and a 9.7 MB download. After the podcast I gave Om’s RSS a makeover including switching his feed to FeedBurner, adding more branding by utilizing more…
Yahoo! Mail RSS
The next version of Yahoo! Mail includes a feed aggregator as a sidebar option. The front-end is based on Oddpost’s blog aggregation technology and the front-end code even includes Oddpost copyright statements and comments. The back-end is the same as My Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Mail feed aggregator supports RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 0.3. The aggregator does not support enclosures such as podcasts. Screenshots and analysis is based on Yahoo Mail 0.3.0 build 176. Yahoo! is the first major webmail provider to integrate a full-post aggregator into the mail client. Millions of Yahoo! Mail users will…
Microsoft announces Simple Sharing Extensions
Ray Ozzie announced Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML this morning. Ray explains on his weblog the need to synchronize data such as contacts, calendaring, and read status on a wide range of devices across multiple profiles such as personal, family, and professional. The new namespace is the first extension of OPML I know of. Ray mentions there “nothing to announce right now in terms of which [Microsoft] products will support the spec, when, and for what purpose, but people are experimenting with it and are intrigued.” The acronym “SSE” makes me think of Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions processor…
FeedBurner State of RSS report
FeedBurner just published a report on the current state of RSS and Atom syndication formats across a variety of publisher types with varying goals. The graphic above helps illustrate the difference between feed search and blog search. While the two used to be almost one and the same, blog search focuses on just blogs and podcasts and not commercial publishers, web services, watchlists, and other peer-produced content. I think the report was a bit light on monetizing subscribers, so I hope FeedBurner addresses advertising in syndication feeds as its next market report topic. Tags: atom, rss…
W3C Feed Validator
The W3C now has a feed validator based on the open source software feedvalidator. I like the support for direct input as well as its close proximity to the HTML markup validator. They also have an open SOAP 1.2 API for validation via a web service. Tags: atom, rss…
Outlook 12 RSS support in latest beta
The latest version of Office, 12.0.3111.1010, has hit the peer-to-peer networks and developer Alexander Gorlach has posted his first impressions and detailed screenshots of the subscription and reading interface. Microsoft throttles the feed update rate and respects the TTL element. Users can override this update limit which could be pretty scary as RSS updates are currently integrated with the standard send/receive function along with e-mail and most e-mail is checked every 5 minutes or so. Outlook 12 also supports the ability to download all enclosures for a subscription, regardless of the file type. Enclosures can deliver some nasty payloads to…
Windows Vista will require well-formed XML feeds
The Windows Vista team just announced that the next version of Windows will not process any web feeds that are not well-formed XML. I think it is a good move and saves a lot of development headaches. Feed publishers should periodically check their feeds using tools such as Feed Validator to discover any potential problems and evaluate some of problems revealed by warning messages. Errors in your feed might result in your message not being delivered to your readers. Tags: atom, RSS, windowsvista…
VeriSign acquires Moreover
Moreover Technologies has been acquired by VeriSign for between $25 million and $30 million. The acquisition is VeriSign’s second announced move in the blogging space in the past week having previously acquired Weblogs.com. Moreover founders David Galbraith and Nick Denton confirmed the deal on their own personal blogs. Rafat Ali reports Google came in with a higher bid a little too late. Moreover currently powers sites such as My MSN feed modules, and Microsoft has to be questioning its relationship with Moreover if it was not already. It’s interesting to hear Google attempted to make a play for the company…
Vote for the Internet Explorer 7 feed icon
The Microsoft Internet Explorer team is soliciting feedback for the icon used to represent the presence of a feed in a web page viewed in Internet Explorer 7. I personally like option 4. The suggested icon is very similar to Firefox Live Bookmarks icon and shows the transmission of content from one point to many possible receivers. Tags: IE7…
Google Reader
Google just released their web-based feed reader named Google Reader. Users can login using their Google account and track web feeds in a two-column layout with a default sort of “relevance.” Google is not currently pulling from its archive of past blog entries and only displays the items currently present in the feed. The first column displays a list of subscribed feeds and switches to a list of posts when you click an item. Posts are displayed in the sidebar drawer using title and publication date only. The complete entry display contains the entry title, author, publication date, link, and…
Yahoo! RSS awareness whitepaper
Yahoo! conducted a study of Internet users in August in an attempt to quantify the ubiquity of RSS among Internet users. Yahoo! released a whitepaper covering some of their findings after surveying over 4000 Internet users in August. Findings Only 12% of those surveyed were aware of RSS, and only 4% have knowingly used RSS. 27% of respondents had interacted with RSS content in personalized start pages such as My Yahoo! but did not realize they were using RSS. The average RSS user subscribed to 6.6 feeds and spend an average of 4.1 hours per week reading those feeds. Only…
Interview with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons of NewsGator
I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons to talk about the NewsGator and its recent acquisition of Ranchero Software. I spent about 30 minutes with Greg and Brent talking about how they decided to work together, how NetNewsWire contributes to NewsGator’s product strategy and revenue goals, and what changes we can expect from both sides in the near future. I asked a few questions Greg and Brent had never discussed and there are definitely a few details yet to be worked out. We also talked about Nick Bradbury and NewsGator’s acquisition of Bradbury…
NewsGator purchases NetNewsWire
NewsGator Technologies has a new page on their site about the acquisition of NetNewsWire. Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire, will be joining the NewsGator team as a product architect according to a release on the NewsGator site. Om Malik scooped the news last night. The phrasing of the announcement is around NetNewsWire only. I presume NewsGator has acquired all of Ranchero software, including products such as editing software MarsEdit, and not just NetNewsWire. NewsGator Technologies now produces software in C#, ASP.net, Delphi, and Objective C. Lack of a unified codebase and the company’s reliance on one engineer per…
NewsFire blocks RSS ads
I noticed something new and interesting in the NewsFire release notes today: NewsFire now blocks advertisements from Google and FeedBurner. NewsFire is the first aggregator I know of to block advertisements in the default installation and not a custom user-supplied CSS stylesheet. I tested the new feature with Brad Feld’s feed and Engadget’s feed and both display advertisements in the source but not when displayed in NewsFire. I cannot find any way to enable advertisements at the application or feed level. Is NewsFire the first of what may be many aggregators to block advertisements in feeds? Will products tout this…
Firefox feed styling
I downloaded the nightly build of Firefox this morning and noticed a new default styling for feeds. Firefox is currently displaying headlines only but it looks like you may be able to adjust that preference through the hovering preference and information box on the right-hand side. A checkbox appears next to items with a link currently in your browser history. Deer Park is the name of Firefox binaries while in alpha development stage. Tags: firefox, deerpark…
Microsoft RSS search using Start.com
Microsoft announced a new version of Start.com yesterday that includes news and feed search. You can view the new Start.com and search for yourself. Search results are displayed in a JavaScript window and each search category’s results are displayed using asynchronous JavaScript. You can subscribe to the feed of any result in the RSS search results. I still don’t like the branding of feed search as “RSS search” but I do still ask for a Kleenex even if it’s a Puffs and my parents call a vacuum cleaner a Hoover even if it’s a Dyson. Tags: microsoft, feedsearch, rss…
Bloglines feed statistics
Ask Jeeves just released some statistics about the size of their database and subscribed users. 1,121,655 feeds with at least one subscriber Slashdot is the most popular feed with 37,400 active subscribers. Bloglines indexes almost 600 million articles (items/entries). Bloglines adds over 2 million new articles to its index daily. My blog has a RSS feed for every post, category, month, as well as custom keyword searches and a feed for the last 15 blog entries. That’s thousands of feeds without even mentioning my Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 feeds. I am definitely not conservative in what I produce and…
NewsGator purchases Bradbury Software
NewsGator Technologies has purchased Bradbury Software in a cash and stock deal. Bradbury Software is develops FeedDemon, a feed aggregator, and TopStyle, a website editor, for the Windows operating system. Nick Bradbury lives in Franklin, Tennessee and is the sole developer and runs his entire business from the top floor of his house. Nick develops in Delphi. I used FeedDemon from its first beta until I moved to Mac last May. NewsGator develops free feed aggregators for Windows Media Center, and online as well as a paid aggregator for Microsoft Outlook. NewsGator is currently developing an enterprise server (“Dino”) for…
FeedBurner introduces paid statistics package
FeedBurner announced Total Stats PRO, its premium statistics package, offering per-item statistics and referrer reports among other features. The new service is an up-sell from the company’s standard statistics offering starting at $5 a month. I do not use FeedBurner but I signed up for a trial account so I could review their new features. FeedBurner tracks the each item through the use of a web bug. The web bug is the URL of the feed with a parameter of g with a numeric value equal to what I am guessing is the post identifier in the FeedBurner database. Example:…
NetNewsWire beta adds tag subscriptions
Ranchero Software just released a new beta version of NetNewsWire. The new beta includes a new special subscription type for tags.
FeedBurner completes second funding round
FeedBurner accepted a $7 million second round of financing led by Mobius Venture Capital.
Ranchero Software interview on DrunkenBlog
DrunkenBlog posted a lengthy interview with Brent and Sheila Simmons of Ranchero Software. The conversation focuses on what it is like to run a small software business and what about Mac software makes Brent love to write clever applications.
Chameleon Bloglines extension
Joshua Taylor created a Bloglines extension to track attention metadata within the Bloglines newsreader.
NewsGator platform roadmap
Greg Reinacker just announced some big new products from NewsGator. NewsGator will now make a play behind the firewall with a product loosely named NewsGator Enterprise Server. NewsGator Enterprise Software will integrate with Exchange and Active Directory and interact with Outlook Web Access, Blackberry, and Exchange ActiveSync without needing to install NewsGator Outlook Edition on desktop computers across the organization. Greg also announced a white label version of NewsGator Online and there will be many APIs on the way for NewsGator Online. The feedback loop taking place on Greg’s blog is very interesting. Greg is actively engaging his community and…
Ask Jeeves purchases Bloglines
Ask Jeeves officially purchased Bloglines. Mark Fletcher and his team will move to the Ask Jeeves remote office in Los Gatos where Mark will be GM of Bloglines. Teoma will power Bloglines search. Bloglines will gather and monetize users’ attention data for contextual advertising. Bloglines launched 18 months ago in June 2003 Official Announcements Ask Jeeves. “Ask Jeeves plans to leverage these technologies across its search and portal brands, and as of today, Bloglines’ Web search capability will be powered by Ask Jeeves’ search technology.” Ask Jeeves Weblog. “There will be no short-term changes to Bloglines that weren’t already…
NewsFire 1.0
David Watanabe just released version 1.0 of NewsFire, a minimalist and speedy feed aggregator for Mac OS X. NewsFire is shareware and may be purchased for $20. I still use NetNewsWire but NewsFire has impressed me for many months with its speed and ease of use. Please open the application to AppleScript so I can write some hacks!…
Ask Jeeves buying Bloglines?
Mary Hodder reports Ask Jeeves is buying Bloglines and Mark Fletcher will be a Jeeves employee on Monday. Is this true? Mark Fletcher is presenting a 20-minute case study this Tuesday on RSS syndication, ad splicing, and blogging at the Media Center event. Perhaps the announcement is meant to coincide with the conference and Mark will use this time to talk about the new Bloglines. Update: Bloglines acquisition is official. Supposedly announced on Friday with an embargo of midnight tonight….
Tag-aware RSS feeds
Brian Del Vecchio wrote a long entry about about splicing a RSS feed by tag and how aggregator developers can create more tag-aware applications. It is possible within the RSS specification, but most feed authors have overlooked how to properly declare tags within their feeds. Flickr does not include categories with its RSS 2.0 feeds and Del.icio.us feeds use Dublin Core subject to provide space-separated tags. Before the feed aggregators can make your life easier we need to all do a better job as content producers to provide valuable information for our users. RSS 2.0 Each RSS 2.0 feed has…
Feed aggregators and robot exlcusion
The world of feed aggregators has been compared to the HTML Internet of 1994 by Scott Rosenberg and others.. We are starting to consume and make sense of this new data, but there are currently no well-defined methods or implementations of selective consumption. If I publish content it is instantly available to feed aggregators and search companies with no restraints on its usage regardless of licensing and robot preferences. If a Major League Baseball launched a weblog for the private, non-commercial use of their audience there is nothing stopping companies from adding or supplementing the content without the consent of…
Atom working draft
A new version of the Atom sydication format working draft is online. There are element changes such as a change in the publish date and updated tags, and new category support. The new draft also adds a length attribute to link elements, enabling podcasting and other applications. Format freeze is supposed to happen Monday, January 17….
Technorati cosmos within NetNewsWire
I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos! This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers’ contest but I won…
Attention.xml export for NetNewsWire
Attention.xml is an open standard to track attention metadata such as what you read and what you would like to learn more about. So far there has been a lot of talk around the idea and what it could mean for synchronization, resource discovery, and social networking. Technorati and Steve Gillmor have talked about the idea but there has been no implementation to show how you could use this open format with existing applications such as web browsers and feed aggregators to make sense out of your daily activity. Until now. I wrote an AppleScript that exports all of your…
Opera version 8 beta
Opera released a beta version of its Opera desktop application last week. The new version features improved RSS handling including address bar support similar to Apple’s plans for Safari RSS. A user can choose between RSS feeds declared as alternate links of type application/rss+xml. After you subscribe to one or more feeds a Feeds menu appears showing your subscriptions and unread items per feed. The Opera RSS browser treats each RSS item as a mail message, complete with the e-mail address of the item’s author. I did not check to see which RSS element is pulled here but I…
Forbes on RSS
Forbes has a brief article about RSS feeds changing the business landscape. Some inaccuracies in the article: “Instead of searching for information, you get RSS to push it to you.” RSS is a pull technology, not push. A user requests the data and is sent a response. “Technorati.com is now monitoring more than 5 million RSS-enabled blogs.” Technorati claims to watch over 5.2 million weblogs, but Technorati builds its database primarily by parsing HTML. Technorati is not a RSS-based searcher as the article claims….
Tiger adds default RSS reader option
The next version of Macintosh operating system, 10.4 code named Tiger, defines a default RSS reader at the system level. Preferences in the current early start kit allow a user to define the time between feed updates, the color annotation of a new article, and when to remove stored items. Hopefully this means aggregators will be able to share a common feed storage location. Update: MacNet took down at the request of Apple Legal. The preference pane showed a drop-down boxes to select the default RSS reader, choose an update interval, highlight new items, and the length of time to…
Bloglines adds international flavors
Bloglines is now available in Spanish, Japanese, traditional Chinese, French, German, and Portuguese. Mark should open up the interface and allow users to add their own launguages like Google’s interface….
Adam Bosworth’s ISCOC talk
Adam Bosworth gave a keynote presentation at the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing in New York yesterday. Lots of good content covering programming languages, information overload, the need for simple technologies to warm people up to a bigger idea, and how the experts will still create the complex technologies while the simple methods coexist. “You want to see the future. Don’t look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload. On the difference between RSS 1.0 and 2.0: There was an abortive attempt to impose a rich abstract analytic formality on this…
Feed update scheduling
I want to be able to define in my feed aggregators when a feed or feed group should not be checked for updates. When I attend a conference or I am at work I am focused on groups of feeds. Please only update those groups automatically until after 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. I know audio from Fresh Air will not be available until 4:30 p.m., so there is no use in teasing me at 10 a.m. while I wait for the audio. Similar to ttl each aggregator could use skipHours or skipDays as the default and not let me…
Firefox Live Bookmarks has a new icon
I just downloaded Mozilla Firefox 1.0 RC1 and noticed the new orange icon for Live Bookmarks. It looks like the broadcasting icon in iCal (pictured above)….
Morgan Stanley Syndication report
I just finished reading the Morgan Stanley report on news syndication from analysts Mary Meeker and Brian Pitz. The report focuses a lot on Yahoo!’s moves into supporting RSS throughout the site, and what Yahoo!’s move to syndication means for publishers. Overall a good paper with busness arguements from a business-oriented source. Some interesting snippets from the 15-page report: While Google’s search engine and advertising tools set the pace for new ways of searching information, we believe that Yahoo! may be setting the pace for new ways of serving information. Bold statement, but no other major player has embraced the…
Coral for distributed content
Scott Johnson mentioned this morning Feedster is looking heavily at NYU’s Coral distributed content system as a possible solution to RSS bandwidth issues. Coral operates over port 8090 and is therefore blocked by most firewalls. Your domain name server must also be aware of DNAME records. Good idea but it needs some kinks worked out for widespread use. BitTorrent uses ports 6881 to 6889 and is therefore blocked by most firewalls as well. Port usage has not stopped the widespread use of BitTorrent, although BitTorrent users are highly technical. A good conversation topic for tonight’s Feedster Developer Dinner at 7…
RSS aggregator roundtable
DrunkenBlog posted an interview with developers of the leading feed aggregators for Mac OS X. Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire, David Watanabe of NewsFire, Rory Prior of NewsMac, Erik J. Barzeski of PulpFiction, and Graham Parks of Shrook answered questions about the basics of RSS, the threat of Safari RSS, auto-discovery of feeds, competing feed formats, and the business model for producing RSS feeds. Graham Parks on feed formats: Atom looks to be so much more reliable and usable than any version of RSS. Once v1.0 is published next year, I imagine there will be few new implementations of RSS. Of…
NewsGator Online Edition now free
NewsGator Online Edition is now a free feature for basic features: NewsGator Web Edition and subscription synchronization. New features include: Per-post rating system. Rate each post from one to five stars. Feed recommendation for paid subscription levels. E-mail feeds. I signed up for a free NewsGator Web Edition account. The service competes with Bloglines and offers cosmos data similar to Technorati. The press release mentions the ability for users to “add the rating feature seamlessly to their own blog site” but I cannot find the code anywhere….
Rojo online aggregator
I have been playing around with Rojo, a new Web-based aggregator from Rojo Networks. Rojo adds social networking features to the feed aggregator space. Define your friends, see what feeds they are subscribed to, and what items of interest they have flagged. They have a strong team with a lot of background in open standards and rich applications. Right now Rojo is available by invitation only and new members can invite 5 other members. I already sent out my invites, but Kevin Burton will set you up if you join #rojo on irc.freenode.net. Rojo currently indexes 700,000 weblogs and makes…
Rojo beta launches
Rojo unveiled its next-generation Web-based feed aggregator to an invitation only list. Chris Alden is excited. Rojo has already indexed over 700,000 feeds, some able to be sorted by topic and popularity. A recommendation engine is built-in. Friends and colleagues can connect to each other within Rojo and flag stories for each other and share what feeds they are reading. Rojo Networks also has some P2P talent in Brad Neuberg and it will be interesting to see how that technology could be utilized given Rojo’s Web interface….
Sort help for feed aggregators
As our lists of feeds grow it becomes more difficult to sort through the clutter that greets us as we fire up our news aggregators. The list of publishers of supported feeds continues to grow, as does the appetite for consumption. The next important step in the feed aggregation space will be how you tame the data available within the application. I propose sorting services that would allow developers to offer their own reclassification of a list of feeds or their content. Pass a list of feeds in OPML and a web service will return the same OPML with an…
NewsGator partners with Six Apart
NewsGator Technologies announced a co-marketing relationship with Six Apart yesterday. NewsGator will resell Movable Type and Six Apart will resell NewsGator for Outlook to its corporate customers. The two companies are also planning joint development work. NewsGator will release a plugin in the next week that lets NewsGator for Outlook users post to Movable Type and TypePad. From the NewsGator press release: NewsGator and Six Apart, the leading provider of weblog publishing software, announced a co-marketing relationship focused on enterprise sales of the two companies’ leading technology platforms. NewsGator also announced that it will be releasing new plug-ins and other…
NetNewsWire 2.0b3
The first public beta of NetNewsWire 2.0 is now available from Ranchero Software. Searching, enclosures, persistence, smart lists, and Rendezvous subscription sharing are the new features I use the most….
Moreover partners with FeedDemon
RSS feeds from Moreover Technologies will be featured in FeedDemon’s default configuration. Although the press release and Nick’s entry do not mention any payments, I have to assume this was a paid inclusion. Currently FeedDemon provides preconfigured channel groups to help users get started with an application full of feeds. The first time a user launches FeedDemon he or she is presented with a list of preconfigured Channel Groups to include if they would like. The user can deselect each group if they would like to have no default feeds. The free Moreover feeds include advertising. I spoke with Nick…
Mediathink RSS White Paper
Mediathink produced a white paper on RSS publishing. The study takes a look at the current aggregator space for the Windows operating system. The study found RSS to be a strong threat to e-mail and established search companies slow to respond the corporate intelligence and product research uses of RSS. Rich media RSS is discussed as an inevitable next step and integrated into TiVo-like devices (with BitTorrent possibilities). We see RSS as the single best method available to receive information from selected sources. RSS possesses the unique ability to eliminate the usual chores of search, navigation, and interruptive marketing avoidance…
Firefox Live Bookmarks
I just downloaded the Firefox 1.0 Preview Release. A new feature called Live Bookmarks allows you to subscribe and read RSS and Atom feeds in your bookmarks. A button appears in your status bar to let you know there has been an alternate source detected and the MIME type is supported by Live Bookmarks. A blue folder appears in your bookmark folder with an individual bookmark for each item or entry in your feed. I like the placement of the icon in the status bar instead of in the address bar like Safari RSS. Another branding win for the RSS…
RFC3229 for partial feed retrieval
Bob Wyman, CTO of PubSub, details how RFC3229, “Delta Encoding in HTTP,” could be used to help solve the bandwidth problem of syndicated feeds. In order to allow the number of entries returned in a feed to be no more than the total number of new or modified inserted into the feed since the last time any specific client retrieved the feed, I propose that we rely on RFC3229 “Delta encoding in HTML” with a new instance-manipulation method defined to provide feed specific delta encoding….
Safari RSS at Apple Expo 2004
Today during the Apple keynote at the Apple Expo in Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, spent about 6 minutes discussing Safari RSS and why users should be excited about interacting with RSS instead of their standard HTML sites. Check out the keynote in QuickTime and skip to the 59th minute to watch the Safari RSS demo….
Bloglines introduces clip blogs
Bloglines revealed a new user interface last night, as well as a new feature for adding an item to your “clippings” and posting to a blog. The clipping service uses the link and the title element….
IETF Forms New Atom Working Group
IETF Atom working group is now official. “The proposed WG schedule calls for release of initial Internet Drafts for the Atom Feed Format and Atom Editing Protocol in June 2004. These Internet Drafts would be submitted approval as Last Call drafts in March 2005, and would be submitted to the IESG for consideration as Proposed Standards in April 2005.”…
Mac DevCenter reviews OS X RSS software
Giles Turnbull of Mac DevCenter reviews three RSS software applications for Mac OS X: NetNewsWire, Pulp Fiction and Shrook. (via Scripting News) I am still waiting on NetNewsWire 2.0, due any day now….
New York Times on RSS
NY Times: “[I]f you can control yourself, you may find that R.S.S. is the best tool yet for taming the Web.” The Bob Scott graphic is interesting. Open the information spigot for the NBA and J Lo!…
Atom Community Meeting IRC chat logs
An IRC chat log is online from today’s Atom Community Meeting. (via Finally Atom)…
Atom Community Meeting Report
Tim Bray will update his blog throughout the day from the Atom Community Meeting. Also live at irc://irc.freenode.net/#atom. Wish I could be there….
Sam Ruby: Each format has its strengths
Sam Ruby posted a long and interesting writeup on the differences between RSS and Atom, and what tool builders need to worry about. “[I]f you want to support any version of RSS completely, you essentially need to support all of them.” “If you can’t generate unique ids for entries, then perhaps Atom is not the format for you.” “Atom has more required elements than RSS. Atom adds type attributes to titles and links to resolve the ambiguity described above. It has separate elements for summary and content.”…
Atom + FOAF = great things
Kendall Grant Clark, faculty research associate in the University of Maryland’s semantic web lab, wrote an interesting XML.com article about the courtship of Atom and who’s courting whom. FOAF plus Atom (or FOAF plus your favorite RSS flavor) is to the Semantic Web what home pages were to the Web. A machine-readable description of a person, plus a machine-readable version of that person’s web space, is enough Semantic Web for us to do really great things, whether or not the hard KR stuff ever amounts to anything at all. This idea is exactly what I was trying to get Technorati…
Minutes from New York City W3C Atom discussion
Minutes from today’s W3C Atom discussion in New York City are posted on the W3C site. Eric Miller, W3C: “In the past 6 months, RDF support has gotten stronger. At the same time, I’ve talked with Tim Berners-Lee, and he has said this will not be done by fiat.” Sam Ruby: “I would like to see more pull from W3C. Work on W3cCharter. IETF is a black hole. I’m not thrilled with them. But it has an external perception of being open.”…
Newsfeed reader user interface, improvements
I have three newsfeed readers open, subscribed to the same feeds, and each program presents each channel, and the items within, notably differently. I examined the default configuration of each application. The traditional model is an alphabetical listing of all channels in a group. Channels with unread items are highlighted, and the number of unread items displayed. Ranchero Software’s NetNewsWire follows this model. A modified model orders the channels by their latest item’s publish date. Graham Parks’ Shrook follows this model. Freshly Squeezed Software’s PulpFiction displays items chronologically, without the navigation through channel listings. The item’s creator appears before the…
Atom Community Meeting
There will be an Atom Community Meeting on Wednesday, June 2, at Sun’s offices in either Menlo Park or Santa Clara. Time to prepare for the August IETF meeting….
More on aggregators and feed distribution
Dave Winer writes more and invites more comments regarding the issues raised in the Wired article. I have had some ideas regarding more community sharing of news feed resources. How can aggregator developers better publish their users subscriptions and activities? Would the end user be willing to have their data published? Share Your OPML is a start. What if aggregators had Share Your OPML functionality built-in? Locally stored and placed online as well. Most users have some online space available, either through their ISP, personal site, MSN, .Mac, etc. You have the dateModified field defined in the head. Expand the…
Wired News: Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?
Ryan Singel of Wired News wonders if RSS readers will clog Web servers. The solution is HTTP status code 304 Not Modified. See section 10.3.5 of the HTTP 1.1 specification for more details. “If a cache uses a received 304 response to update a cache entry, the cache MUST update the entry to reflect any new field values given in the response.” Date is a new field value. If no date found (clockless origin server) you use client date….
Opera 7.5 supports RSS newsfeeds
Opera 7.50 beta 1 is now available. Opera Mail now supports RSS newsfeeds. Integrates with Opera address book so you can see custom avatars for weblog publishers and even their IRC nicks. You can also add the blog publisher as a contact direct from the RSS reader. Supports CSS Level 2 revision 1 with few exceptions. “Newsfeeds” added as access point in the e-mail panel RSS 0.9x, 1.0 and 2.0 are supported Clicking RSS links automatically adds newsfeed to Opera Mail Auto-detection of RSS file (link rel=”alternate”) displayed in navigation bar…
Sony Music RSS
Sony Music has artist RSS feeds for artists such as Beyonce Knowles, Five For Fighting, Jessica Simpson, and Nas….
FeedDemon Beta
Nick Bradbury posted a new FeedDemon beta last night. Aggregate your RSS feeds!…