Support Spontaneous Collaboration with a Sphere

Collaboration and internal group communications are often spontaneous; a quick brainstorm of ideas or an ad hoc clustering of people focused on a topic or problem. For this type of agile collaboration you don’t need a long-term, full-scale community with full document handling capability – you need a Sphere!

NewsGator Social Sites 2010 lets users quickly pull together a public or private group using distribution lists or active directory groups. Tapping into SharePoint audiences, Sphere users can easily gather the right group of people as followers to be part of the conversation – without the need of involving IT.

Since Spheres are all about agility and being flexible in a fast paced environment, simple administration of ownership is vital and easier than ever. A Sphere administrator gets a new tab in the management user interface providing them with the ability to change the ownership of a Sphere as needed. This new admin feature makes a Sphere more able to fulfill its intended function – empowering a workforce with more internal mobility whereby creating a collaborative environment that moves as quickly as your business.

To find out more about how NewsGator Social Sites and its Sphere feature can help you enable a more nimble, collaborative workforce, please visit www.newsgator.com.

Are there instances when self-created and administered breakout groups like Spheres would make sense for your organization?

Meet us at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

This year, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference will focus on building social business. At NewsGator, this is something we’ve been doing long before this theme was announced. We’ll be on-site and would love to show you exactly how we’re assisting other organizations in their social business endeavors. Whether you see us attending, exhibiting or participating in this year’s conference, we would love the opportunity to meet you and learn about your own social business goals.

• Check out Social Sites! We will be in the expo hall at booth 419. Get a first-hand look at our newest release of Social Sites for SharePoint 2010. We can even show you Spotlight, a value-add module for Social Sites that’s driven by meaningful, measurable participation. Spotlight lets your users can shine as subject-matter experts and earn merit-based, electronic badges, while giving organizations the ability to quickly locate, recognize and motivate top performers.
  
  
• Hear us out! J.B. Holston, NewsGator CEO, will be speaking as a panelist in the session Marketplace Choices: Platforms vs. Products, taking place on June 21 at 11:30am in Room 312. This panel will be moderated by Tony Byrne, Real Story Group and will also include Mark Bennett, Oracle; Christian Finn, Microsoft; and Bryan House, Acquia, as the other panelists. This session seeks to assist participants in understanding how their organizational needs match up to those offered by the ever-growing range of vendor choices from wider, platform offerings to smaller, more specific productized solutions.
  
  Eric Sauve, NewsGator’s Vice President of Corporate Development, will be speaking as a panelist in the session Mobile, Social Local, taking place on June 21 at 2:30pm in Room 313. This panel will be moderated by  Maribel Lopez, Constellation Research and will also include Matt Wilkinson, Socialcast; Lawrence Coburn, DoubleDutch; and Charlie Isaacs, Alcatel Lucent Applications Group, as the other panelists. This session will examine how mobile, social and local are combining to create richer services which aren't just for consumers and how this combination can help your business and the future of work.
  
  
• Come say hello! J.B. Holston, CEO, Eric Sauve, VP, Corporate Development, and Melissa Risteff, VP, Marketing, will be on-site and available to chat. They’d love to hear from you so please feel free to engage them if you see them around the show or in our booth.
  
  
• Stay connected! Keep up with all of the e2.0 conference (#e2conf) action by following our tweets. You can catch NewsGator at @newsgator, J.B. at @jholston, Eric at @esauve and Melissa at @mristeff on Twitter.

 

NewsGator Enterprise Social Software News

We interrupt the staggering growth of Enterprise 2.0 for a special bulletin: We’re finding wonderful homes for NewsGator’s legacy consumer applications, and about to launch a great new spin-off in the social software collaboration space.

We sold Taplynx and NetNewsWire last week, and today we’re announcing a new spin-off, Sepia Labs. You’ll be hearing a lot more about what the group behind Sepia Labs is up to in the coming weeks.

NewsGator’s enterprise business continues to soar, and will remain the company’s primary focus.

A few more details on the consumer businesses:

We announced the sale last week of Taplynx, the easiest way to make an iPhone or iPad app. The buyer was our good neighbor in Boulder, industrial strength mobile services provider Push IO, which will soon add in-app purchasing and its own brand of advertising support. They’re a longtime partner, and we can’t wait to see where they take the framework.

The next day, we said good-bye to NetNewsWire, our enormously popular RSS reader for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. NetNewsWire/Mac has won an O’Reilly Mac OS X Innovators Award and two Macworld Eddy awards. In 2008, Time Magazine named NetNewsWire for iPhone one of its top 10 iPhone apps. Black Pixel of Seattle, another friend of the family, was the lucky buyer. “Imagine turning over something you created and then worked on for nine years,” blogged NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons. “You’d want to be damn sure it was going to the right place. I did.”

To the consumer customers of NewsGator, thank you for your business and loyalty. I hope you’ve been amply rewarded by a better Internet experience. You can bet we’ll stay tuned to further developments from Taplynx and NetNewsWire.

This week we’re announcing that we’ll be spinning off Sepia Labs, to be run by the prodigious team that brought you Taplynx and NetNewsWire. We aren’t talking too much about what they’ll be launching in about a month, but I strongly encourage you to sign up to learn more here.

NewsGator’s growth in the exploding ‘social business software’ category continues.  We’re proud to have the world’s best line-up of enterprise-class installations, with over 2.5 million paid users, including Accenture, Biogen Idec, Charles Schwab, Deloitte, Edelman, Fujitsu, General Mills, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kraft Foods, Novartis, Unisys Corporation, the United States Air Force, the United States Army, and many many more.

Stay tuned for more news in the coming weeks – the new world of work is dawning.

Share your clippings with ReadBurner

If you haven't already seen it, the good folks at ReadBurner have built an application to show the most frequently shared content across the web. That content could come from Google Reader or Netvibes...

...or starting today, from NewsGator clippings! If you're using clippings from NewsGator Online, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Go!, or any of our other applications, you're all set. Nick Bradbury has details of how to make all of this work on his blog.

Give it a try, share with the world, and let us know what you think!

Turning Negatives Into Positives

Metallica is in the news again, this time apologizing for taking down reviews of its work by fans on its website.

Interestingly, Metallica apparently was taking down even "mostly positive reviews," which seems rather silly and, unfortunately, par for the course for this now doddering, once-admired power trio. But the fact remains that most companies and business executives, like Metallica, react unfavorably to reviews, especially ones critical of their own products or services.

We have never felt that way about critical reviews at NewsGator, and according to a post from Joshua Porter at bokardo.com, you probably shouldn't either. Negative reviews don't have to be downers.

Porter explains that many websites won't add reviews because "allowing the public to criticize products on their site would have several negative effects," including loss of sales. But, Porter adds, most negative reviews are genuine and helpful, and they create the opportunity to use them as input. He says that for many companies, "this is a tough pill to swallow, as it's not easy to admit shortcomings."

For those of us who have gotten used to eating crow (like this ex-journalist), that is hardly news. And as Porter points out, by paying heed to complaints and criticism and acting upon them, you'll likely wind up with reviews that are positive.

So the next time you read a tweet that says something like, "NewsGator's API sucks," don't panic. Read the post and act accordingly. It's the positive thing to do.

Eek. I've Got Web 2.0 Syndrome

Like anything else that explodes out of nowhere, social computing is already developing its own neuroses. Well, not really, but sometimes it seems like it is. The Online Journalism Blog came up with seven “complaints as social media addicts adapt to the demands of new technologies and fluctuating social structures.”

Some seem almost real, especially if you work at a company that is all about social media and computing. Comment Guilt is defined as regrets “that they are not commenting more on other people’s blogs,” leaving “feelings of worthlessness and frustration.” And of course there is the RSS Reader Sisyphus Complex, which describes someone who spends an entire morning reading RSS feeds, “only to find there are still 8,978 posts unread.” (Hint: Delete them all.)

But my favorites are Twitterhoeia, the “uncontrollable urge to share most mundane experiences – or, more commonly, lack of experiences – with Twitter followers. Generally involves consumption of food,” and Six Degrees of Separation Syndrome, which is “the delusion that he or she is just one friend removed from anyone else in the world and compulsively adds friends on social networks.”

The authors came up with four more, including Meme Orphanism, in a later post. Los Angeles Times writers add their own, including FriendFeed Phobia, which is pretty self-explanatory, and Obsessive Compulsive Blogging Disorder, which might be why you’re reading about this here.

It’s the End of the Web As We Know It and Other Rumors

Apple Scrapple

In the We’re Finally Glad It’s Over Department, Stephen Jobs announced Monday Apple’s plans to upgrade its popular iPhone. Beginning July 11, the new models will come in 8 and 16 GB at prices of $200 and $300 respectively, and will have GPS, along with some smaller modifications.

It finally put to end rumors that threatened to clog up the Net over the last two months as bloviated bloggers offered their withering speculation of Apple’s plan. If you needed a good argument to stop paying bloggers per post, this would have to be it.

Jittery Twitterers

You can’t help but be somewhat amused at the current downtime problems at Twitter. With Twitter down, nobody can bad-mouth it, so complainers are left with slow, cumbersome technologies like email and blogs to vent their frustrations.

The End of the Web As We Know It

And finally, a group of “Internet activists” are predicting the end of the Internet by the year 2012, to be replaced by a subscription model that will make people pay extra to use non-commercial sites. Other than a reference to an article being written in a future Time magazine, no proof is offered, but they seem genuinely concerned. Watch it while it’s still free.

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

One of the current journalism memes is that there is a great divide between print reporters and old-time newspaper people and bloggers. Often the reporters are portrayed as crotchety old farts with no enthusiasm for the new media.

Don’t tell that to Andrew Malcolm. At age 64, Malcolm has years of experience as an international correspondent at The New York Times and a feature writer at The Los Angeles Times. He has also worked the “other side,” serving as Laura Bush’s press secretary for a time. Mark Glaser has an interview with Malcolm, who is now working at the LATimes to help anchor the paper’s political blog. He is eager to dispel a few notions about journalism and blogging.

Here’s the key sentence, at least for this sometime journalist: “To me … journalism was a place where people who wanted to learn the rest of their lives went to work,” he said. That’s the reason many of us get into journalism in the first place – to learn as much as you can about as many subjects as possible. And doing a weblog is just another extension of that.

Another newspaper political blogger, Ryan Beckwith, at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., says in an interview with Talk Politics that the divide between bloggers and reporters is already lessening. He is already seeing convergence. “Over time, I think papers will learn to be more immediate, more chatty and more transparent, while bloggers will learn to be more rigorously sourced, more fair and objective.”

And to those dire warnings of inevitable newspaper extinction? “Any student of biology can tell you that the dinosaurs didn’t disappear, they evolved. Their descendants are the birds we encounter every day. They are nimble, require fewer resources and can do things that dinosaurs only dreamed about. Oh, and there are millions of them.”

Speaking of political blogs, don’t forget that the Washington Post/Newsweek Campaign Tracker widget, powered by NewsGator, is available here for anyone with a Windows Mobile Phone.

More About Collaborative Filtering

The two current buzzwords in the RSS world are “collaborative” and “filtering,” usually used together. Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb takes a closer look at how two companies, Illumio and NewsGator Online, are approaching collaborative filtering.

Perez finds a lot to like about Illumio and the way it filters feeds and content, but she picks NewsGator as the better product overall because it works on all platforms (Illumio is a Windows-only product) and because of SenseArray and AideRSS, two filtering services with which NewsGator has partnered. It’s worth reading if you’re still trying to understand how and why filtering can be useful for RSS reader users.

Phoning It In: The Presidential Campaign Comes to Your Mobile

If you have a Windows Mobile Phone and you’re following the presidential campaign closely, we have something just for you.

Along with washingtonpost.com and Newsweek magazine, we have created Campaign Tracker to build upon those two publications’ political coverage of the candidates and the election.

Newsweek and the Post are aggregating political content from their many sources using NewsGator’s Editor’s Desk and offering users up-to-the-minute news on any given candidate. There is no website involved, so users can access content without being on the Internet – you can even do it on a plane -- and each post contains the entire article so you don’t have to click through to read something.

It’s really cool, and easy to set up. So what are you waiting for? Go to this page and sign up. Like all our consumer products, it’s free.