140 Character Communications - Twitter

Posted by Laura Farrelly on May 17, 2008
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Here at NewsGator, a bunch of us are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. There have been a lot of really insightful articles recently about why Twitter matters, not just for individuals but also for businesses and the media at large. In fact, Twitter broke the news of the recent earthquake in China ahead of the main stream press, and recently a U.S. grad student was able to Twitter his way out of an Egyptian prison.

As a service grows popular, however, spammers inevitably come into the fray. Unfortunately, they've started to send out manipulative messages about our free RSS readers NetNewsWire and FeedDemon. Clearly, we're not behind the messages and there's not much we can really do about it, but we have been tweeting about our new release of FeedDemon 2.7. It is indeed free, and you can download it here. If you're more of a Mac person, you can get our free reader NetNewsWire instead.

Twitter is a great medium for connecting with friends or meeting people with similar interests, and it's also handy for companies to keep up with what their customers are thinking and let people know about new products or services. We're doing this with our NewsGator Widget account (you can follow us at http://twitter.com/newsgatorwidget), and companies like Comcast, Zappos, Evernote and more are finding that they're able to have really meaningful interactions with customers through Twitter. Several of our execs are on Twitter too, if you'd like to follow them to keep up with what's going on at NewsGator and in their lives:

Jeff Nolan, our VP of SaaS can be found at: http://twitter.com/jeffnolan
Greg Reinacker, our founder and CTO is here: http://twitter.com/gregr
Walker Fenton, our GM of Saas is at http://twitter.com/walkerfenton

We hope you too see you on Twitter, and let us know what you're thinking about FeedDemon, NetNewsWire or NewsGator!

 

Neil Young and the Triumph of Technology Over Audience

Posted by Leland Rucker on May 12, 2008
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Social Computing

There was big news last week in the technology and music spaces when Neil Young announced, at the opening of the JavaOne Conference, that he would finally be releasing the masterwork he has been threatening for more than twenty years only on the Blu-Ray platform, which runs on Java.

The masterwork is a five-volume series of boxed sets with interactive, multi-media elements that will include music, letters, personal archives, memorabilia, photos, video and manuscripts, plus the quality sound of the Blu-Ray format. The first one, a 10-disc set, covers the years 1963-1972, the period when Young emerged from obscurity to join the Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and begin to blossom as a solo artist.

"Previously, there was no way to browse archival material on a disc and listen to a song in high resolution at the same time," said Young on Tuesday. "It is important for me that the user experience the high-resolution music along with the archival visual material. Previous technology required unacceptable quality compromises. I am glad we waited and got it right."

I consider myself a Neil Young fan. I have many of his albums and have seen him numerous times in concert (most recently the Denver date of the current tour.)

But I don’t have a Blu-Ray player. Less than 10 million people do. As a format, Blu-Ray recently won out over HD as the next-generation video format. A quick check on c/net shopper lists player prices still mostly in the high hundreds range, not exactly something I’d buy so I could listen to Neil Young, no matter how many unreleased photos, manuscripts and songs are included.

Besides choosing the most expensive format for his archives, Young has also recently disparaged the mp3, that pesky little audio format that sacrifices quality of sound for ease of accessibility and has brought the music industry to its knees, for its inability to give a listener the experience Young intends. "Putting on a headphone and listening to an MP3 is like hell," he said. His aim is to give the audience "quality whether they want it or not. You can degrade it as much as you want, we just don't want our name on it".

Apparently, I’m not the only one who wonders why Young has apparently chosen product placement over serving his constituency. Paul Cashmere, who knows more about Blu-Ray than I do, asks a bunch of questions about Young’s decision, ultimately asking if he will be alienating rather than inspiring his fan base.

I think it’s wonderful that Young wants to present his material in the best possible technology available. But if his followers aren’t Blu-Ray users – and I suspect I’m not an unusual case – and the music won’t be available on CD, they’re left to wait for the P2P networks to extract the music and make it available for free – on mp3. Talk about defeating your purpose. Unless Young offers the music in CD and downloadable forms – and this could be a later part of the marketing plan -- he may find few buyers for one of the most sought-after major-artist collections ever made.

Another technology news story this weekend made me think again about Young’s decision to go with the highest tech available.

It’s an Associated Press story that details how an engineer has recovered data from a disk drive that plunged to earth in the fiery demise of the Columbia Space Shuttle in 2003. The drive, part of an experiment studying the properties of liquid xenon, was found six months after the disaster in Texas, and engineer Jon Edwards was able to extract data even though the disc was scorched and the seal that keeps out dirt and dust had melted. (There's a photo of it at the top of this post.)

Though other disc drives were recovered from Columbia, the reason only this one was salvagable is that the computer was running DOS, one of the early operating systems with which any PC user from the 1980s through the 1990s is probably familiar. Edwards said that the main reasons he was able to extract the data is that the tape continued to hold an eclectic charge and that DOS does not scatter data all over drives as most later systems do.

No one is asking for a return to DOS as a result of the findings. But it does beg the question of whether new technologies are always the better ones.

 

Facebook for the Enterprise – Part 1

Posted by Laura Farrelly on May 8, 2008
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Business Products , Enterprise 2.0 , Social Computing , Social Networks

Although Facebook began as a social networking site for college students – a site where they could upload pictures of their friends and write on one another's wall – it has quickly evolved into a wildly popular social network for high school students, professionals and everyone in between, with a valuation in the billions. As its popularity has skyrocketed, users have come to realize that Facebook has several very attractive collaboration and networking attributes including:

• Rich user profiles

• Easy discovery of friends to build a social graph

• Easy creation and joining of groups

• Easy content generation

• Intuitive display of updates based on social graph

Today, many businesses are seeing employees apply these social elements of Facebook to their jobs, forming Facebook groups around work projects and job interests. Looking to take advantage of this high-level collaboration and the power of the social graph, companies are now bringing Facebook-like features behind the firewall.

Over the next few weeks, we'll discuss the ways in which a Facebook-type network for the enterprise benefits both businesses and workers, and what the important distinctions are between Facebook and a social network built specifically for the enterprise, such as NewsGator's Social Sites (to get a brief summary of the latest release, here’s a brief Computerworld article that gives a good introduction). We'll cover the various aspects of social networks including the profile page, the home page, groups, news feeds, privacy features and sharing, and how these elements can support effective business communication and increased productivity.

The Facebook profile page contains information about a user that can be viewed by their friends and people in their network. Facebook users can customize their profile pages to include photos, favorite movies and books, interesting articles or videos from across the Web, and career and education history. The Facebook profile page also includes a mini-feed that shows recent activity and links to a user’s friends and groups.

Similarly, NewsGator Social Sites’ profile page contains information about a user that people in their company can tap into in order to get a sense of who they are and with whom and what they're working on.  

 

The Social Sites profile page includes a person’s photo, interests, work and education history, work communities, favorite subscriptions, and clipped articles.  The profile page also shows the user’s most recent activity within the company’s intranet/portal (i.e. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007).  And notably, although the page is customizable, much of the content is automatically generated through a user's daily authoring, tagging and reading, so he or she doesn't have to update information constantly. When users are given easy access to information about what someone in a certain role is reading, what they're interested in and what they've done most recently on SharePoint, further connections and collaborative relationships happen effortlessly.

One of our clients, CME Federal Credit Union, provides banking services to 26,000 members from multiple branches located throughout Ohio. With a highly distributed workforce, it was often difficult for CME’s branch personnel to find and connect with other employees. CME implemented Social Sites profile pages to facilitate collaboration and make it easier for branch employees to find subject matter experts.  This enterprise application of social networks, combined with other social computing features, enabled CME to improve productivity and realize a time savings of 30 minutes per day per employee.

The bottom line is that social networks in the enterprise enable people to find one another through shared connections and interests that they otherwise wouldn't know they had in common. And when minds come together to tackle a common problem, the business benefit is great indeed.

 

So You’re Wondering About Social Computing

Posted by Leland Rucker on May 8, 2008
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Social Computing

If you spend any time on the Internet, use RSS or read tech publications, you are probably aware of the terms social computing and social networking, even if you’re not sure exactly what they mean. You’re not alone.

Brian Kellner, NewsGator’s vice president of products, is in the trenches, as they say, working with NewsGator’s Enterprise Server and Social Sites, the social computing software that enhances Microsoft Sharepoint Server. Greg Shields over at Realtime Windows Server Community interviewed Kellner recently, and the conversation is available for listening or downolad as a podcast here.

In a way that even us non-developer types can understand, Kellner explains the history behind the current interest in social computing and how it can save companies time, facilitate collaboration and build productivity in a work atmosphere that is similar to Facebook and other social networks.

 

Twitternews for the Twitterfaithful

Posted by Leland Rucker on May 6, 2008
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

I haven’t made the move to Twitter yet – call me a Luddite, please – but the news about the popular 140-character communication software continues unabated. And, perhaps because of the name itself and how easy it is to create new words with it – ie. the Twittersphere – my fascination continues.

Over at Techcrunch, Michael Arrington ruminates about how Twitter has become a monopoly in the micro-blogging space, now completely indispensable for many execs and techfolks, even though the service’s service quality problems and outages are frequent and troublesome. “I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me,” he half-laments. “It’s a huge marketing tool, and information tool. But it is also a social habit that’s hard to kick.”

Would that make him a Twitteraddict?

Meanwhile, over at C/net, Jessica Dolcourt last week wrote about the uptick in Twitterspam. This follows a Mashable post about Twitterspam that explains the surge in new Twitter subscriptions that are actually fake accounts used to advertise something or other. She argues for better native blocking tools for the service and mentions an app called – what else? -- Twitter Twerp Scan that was created to find Twitterspammers -- or are they Twitterscammers?

 

Would Wolfman Jack Rule the Web?

Posted by Leland Rucker on May 5, 2008
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Marc Fisher over at the Washington Post has an interesting piece about the similarities between the Web and AM radio, which he calls the Web’s “spiritual grandfather.”

It is a good analogy. Fisher riffs off the idea that the Web, like AM radio, should take advantage of that fact that it can offer local news listeners can’t get elsewhere. “From tiny small-town stations specializing in farm reports and high school sports coverage to booming big-city outlets that pioneered the concepts of all-news, sports talk and Top 40 pop hits -- is where much of what's popular on the Internet got its inspiration,” he writes.

He credits radio swap-shop call-in shows with being predecessors to Craigslist, sports phone-in shows as earlier versions of today’s fan message boards. Stations that broadcast in other languages are “proto Facebook groups of an earlier era.”

Fisher’s points about the synergy of the two media are well taken. But he could be making the same inferences about newspapers. The one thing that city or town newspapers have that no one else has is local news. Reporters for local papers are the only ones covering city-council meetings and following local government.

But instead of investing in the new technologies or sending reporters to cover those local events, many newspapers continue to offer buyouts to their employees, gutting their staffs and eliminating much local coverage in favor of paying stockholders quarterly dividends. When the dividends dry up, as they invariably will, newspaper editors will be left with plenty of unique topics to cover, and no one to send.

 

“iPhone Prices to Drop,” Somebody Says

Posted by Leland Rucker on April 30, 2008
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

We make no bones in this space about how Internet users, overwhelmed with a surfeit of content and opinion, need to be very careful which information they choose to accept, believe and share or pass on.

Here is a current example. Fortune magazine reported Tuesday at 5:23 p.m., beneath a headline that indicates certainty (AT&T to Cut the Price of Apple’s new iPhone) that on or around the one-year anniversary of the iPhone’s debut in late June, the price will drop to almost half. The story is attributed to “a person familiar with the strategy.”

The Fortune story made little sense and left much to be desired (like even a single detail of said “strategy”). I wondered if the reporter had questioned the “person familiar with the strategy” or merely served as a stenographer for the “news” that person provided. But it was dutifully picked up by technology bloggers without, apparently, much interest beyond another easy post. This one even says that Fortune "pseudo-confirmed" that the new iPhones will have GPS. Pseudo-confirmed? Doesn't that mean NOT confirmed?

By 7:59 p.m. some reason began to take hold. Saul Hansell, in The New York Times Bits blog, begins to ask obvious questions about what is nothing more, at this point, than a "pseudo-confirmed" rumor made by an unnamed source. “Fortune wrote that AT&T will offer the subsidy to people who buy the phones in its stores,” Hansell writes. “I can’t imagine that Apple would want to sell iPhones for even a dime more in its stores than other stores.” Duh.

This reminds me of media reliance on polls. Have many times have you heard a network talking head run off some poll figures -- "Obama down among children 9-12" -- while making the disclaimer, "polls aren't always right?"

So why use them? Being first, even if you don’t know what you’re talking about, might be nice. Asking obvious questions and being right is much nicer.

 

Brew Blog Breaking Busch Beer News

Posted by Leland Rucker on April 28, 2008
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Did you know that Anheuser-Busch is adding a lime-flavored beer to its Bud Light franchise? If you did, you have the Brew Blog to thank. James Arndorfer, a former reporter for Advertising Age magazine, broke the story, with the spin that Anheuser was selling a knock-off of Miller Chill, a lime-brew it introduced last year.

What’s interesting about this is that Brew Blog is sponsored by Miller Brewing Company, a rival beer giant. Arndorfer was hired as a reporter to watchdog Anheuser, the largest brewer in the United States, with more than 50 percent of the market. Miller, with 20 percent of the market share, wants to tap A-B's considerable lead.

Many corporate blogs are little more than shills for their respective product, which is, as we all know, boring, boring, boring. But Miller took the step of hiring a journalist (newspaper reporters whose jobs are in jeopardy, listen up) to write news – especially about its main competitor – in the form of blog posts. The Wall Street Journal quotes Stephen Quigley, an associate professor of public relations at Boston University: "'They are trying to aggressively go around the gatekeepers.' It's something you couldn't do five years ago."

Besides making it much more difficult to control your brand and how it is perceived in the marketplace – ask the presidential candidates about that one -- the move also fires a shot across the bows of newspapers and business publications, which often run press releases about products as news. The effect of beating Anheuser to its own marketing efforts portrayed the company as a copy cat – not exactly the plan.

Brew Blog is aimed at beer industry leaders and executives, but it is available to anyone without charge and is clearly marked as a Miller-sponsored product. (Get the RSS feed URL here.) I wouldn’t expect it to be breaking news about new Miller products or secrets. It is clearly marked as owned by Miller Brewing Company, and yet it is providing real news. Like The Smoking Gun watchdogging newspapers and writers, Brew Blog is already part of the new news conversation.

Jupiter Research’s David Card finds an interesting comment near the end of the Journal story. Harry Schuhmacher, editor of Beer Business Daily, a trade publication subscribers pay for, is upset about the Brew Blog and says that since it’s hurting the trade press (ie. his business), he is writing less about Miller than he did before.

Isn’t that kind of bias one of the main reasons “real” news sources are losing their credibility?

 

Sorting It Out with Activity and AideRSS

Posted by Leland Rucker on April 24, 2008
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Individual Products

When it comes to sorting my feeds, I generally am an old-school kind of guy. Since RSS brings me the newest information on websites, I tend to keep my sort order on Newest. Recently, NewsGator added two new ways to sort posts in a feed, so I decided to do a little research and find out more about how they worked.

You might have noticed the changes yourself if you’re using NewsGator Online. If you go to Sort Order at the top right of any list of posts, you’ll see that you can list them not only by Newest and Oldest, but now by Activity and AideRSS PostRank.

What’s the difference? I picked a popular, prolific feed to see how changing the sort order would work. It was easy to choose Boing Boing, “a directory of wonderful things” collected by author Cory Doctorow and a small circle of friends fascinated by the Internet. I have 89 feeds unread.

When I sort by Newest, the first post is, of course, the most recent. It’s about Wesabe, a company whose goal is help people spend money more intelligently, followed by a video of a resort in Disneyland that has sat idle, like a ruin, for several years. Third up is a post that links to author Neil Gaiman’s piece on the Harry Potter copyright lawsuit.

Sorting by Activity lists posts according to their interaction inside NewsGator. When a NewsGator user clips, emails or tags a post, it gives that post more authority and it rises in the mix. This lets me see quickly which posts are grabbing other users’ attention. (This is what we call “attention streams.”) The first Boing Boing post under Activity is one from Tuesday about people who enjoy photoshopped images of pin-ups being squished by elephant trunks. The second looks at books that changed the lives of famous scientists, followed by a post with photos of luxury hotels that were never finished and are rotting in the desert.

This offers a nice contrast to the Newest sort. With 89 posts, I know I’m not going to be interested in all of them, and this puts posts that other people find most interesting in the forefront. And if I am a publisher of a feed, Activity sort offers instant feedback on which posts are getting the most attention (and which ones aren’t) – within NewsGator. If I'm in a hurry and want to see only posts other people like, this is a good choice.

When I switch to AideRSS PostRank, I get a third way to sort my feeds. NewsGator recently partnered with AideRSS, which scores, filters and tracks the performance of any RSS feed across the Web. According to this sort option, the top posts include a story of a man detained for taking photos in an English town’s pedestrian area, a 2001 profile of former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers and one about how gun owners are happier than the rest of us.

So Activity sort judges how users within NewsGator are ranking posts, and AideRSS PageRank shows how users on the Web interact with content. The AideRSS PageRank only ranks the top 1000 feeds within the NewsGator system, so you won’t see activity on every feed.
For more information about attention streams, see this post by NewsGator’s Jeff Nolan, while Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb explains AideRSS in more detail.

 

Enterprise RSS Day of Action - April 24, 2008

Posted by Laura Farrelly on April 24, 2008
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action, organized by James Dellow, is in full swing.  The goal of this online event is to raise awareness of the benefits of RSS within an enterprise setting.  James has created a wiki that is full of resources that Enterprise RSS champions can use to run awareness programs within their organizations. We have contributed several resources to this wiki.  In addition, we have created a widget with RSS feeds related to the Day of Action.  If you would like to track the day’s activities, you can add this widget to your start page, social networking site, or blog with one simple click.  Visit our Enterprise RSS blog to obtain the widget.