You may recall from previous posts on this blog (here and here), that NewsGator has partnered with Gigya so that we can use their Wildfire distribution and tracking platform to increase the number of places online you can simply and easily port NewsGator widgets.  Now that the integration is complete, you can port our widgets to the following sites with just one click: iGoogle, Blogger, Pageflakes, Typepad, Freewebs, Netvibes and Vox; in the future, even more options will become available.

This situation is one in which the new NewsGator Technical Blog comes in very handy.  Our Techincal Support Engineers, Jenny and Dan, have written two posts that you may find useful now that we're integrated with Gigya.  The first -- "Wanna Grab a Gigya Gallery?" -- explains how you can show a Gigya sharing gallery on its own, without having to render a widget. The second post gives you access to lots of useful information that we've provided for you so that you can, among other things, learn how to:

• convert your custom sharing over to Gigya
• configure the default sharing available from Gigya
• customize the look and feel of the "get this" container box
• create a Gigya gallery for your widget

We hope some of you will find these tips helpful.  If there are specific topics you'd like to see either on this blog or the NewsGator Technical Blog, please leave them in the comments section here or on the technical blog so that we can provide you with the best experience possible when using NewsGator widgets -- now enhanced with Gigya sharing.

[Editor's note: the following is one of a serious of guest posts to appear on this blog; here, NewsGator's Brent Simmons provides you an inside look into NetNewsWire.]

1. The space bar is your friend

NetNewsWire was designed to be read with a cup of coffee in one hand while the other drives the keyboard.

You can go through all your unread news just by tapping the space bar -- it scrolls the current item if it needs scrolling, or goes to the next unread item.

2. It's easy to switch tabs, or go back to the News Items tab

Here are three of my favorite keyboard shortcuts: 9 goes to the previous tab, 0 goes to the next tab, and \ takes you back to the News Items tab.

There are plenty more single-key shortcuts: choose Keyboard Shortcuts from the Help menu to see the list.

3. NetNewsWire plays Flash videos

It doesn't play Flash by default -- it's turned off because Flash is a bit crashy. But you can turn Flash on. Open the preferences window, click the Browsing icon, then click the Web Pages tab. Make sure Enable plug-ins is checked.

If you also want to play Flash videos in news items, click the News Items tab in the same window and again make sure Enable plug-ins is checked.

4. You can validate feeds

If you think a feed is mis-behaving -- especially if it's one of your own feeds -- it can be useful to find out what's wrong.

You can use the online feed validator from within NetNewsWire: just ctrl-click (or right-click) on the feed, then choose Validate this Feed from the contextual menu.

A web page will open that shows the problems, if any, in the feed.

5. Some history: NetNewsWire is six years old

The first public betas of NetNewsWire Lite appeared in 2002. The current OS was Mac OS X 10.1. There was no Safari yet, much less WebKit -- Macs still shipped with Internet Explorer as the default browser!

One of the original discarded names was AquaReader -- here's an old screenshot of the main.m file.

NetNewsWire's immediate predecessor was MacNewsWire, a very simple RSS reader that showed only Mac news. You couldn't add or remove feeds. Here's a screenshot.

Here's what the original, pre-1.0 icon looked like:

Here's what 1.0 looked like.

NetNewsWire 1.0 included a weblog editor (screenshot) that later got split out into MarsEdit, which was later acquired (and wonderfully improved) by Red Sweater Software.

NetNewsWire 2.0 (screenshot) was one of the first apps outside Apple to dispense with the left and right margins. No matter what the Human Interface Guidelines said!

By the time 2.0 came out, I was already ripping off features from my friend Nick Bradbury, whose FeedDemon was such a good app that I figured he was a Mac developer at heart. (Later we became co-workers here at NewsGator.)

Are you attending the Widget Summit 2008 in San Francisco next week?  If you are, rest assured NewsGator will be there as well.  In particular, Walker Fenton, General Manager of NewsGator Media & Consumer Products will be in attendance.

The Widget Summit is occurring next Monday and Tuesday (Nov 3-4) and should be a great experience for anyone in the content syndication space.  According to the organizers:

"this year's conference program includes a detailed look inside the widget platforms changing the way users interact with rich content across multiple environments. Widget Summit will help you reach and engage new audiences across multiple platforms including over 180 million Windows Vista desktops, 25 million active Facebook users, 10 million iPhone smartphones, or the millions of users that call My Yahoo! and iGoogle home every day. The world of widgets reaches beyond a standard web address and into the desktops, mobile phones, social networks, blogs, and personal homepages of today's fragmented online engagements."

So, there you have it!  If you would like to connect with Walker next week, shoot me an email (joshl@newsgator.com) and I'll get you in touch with him.

If you happen to be in NYC area, NewsGator Media & Consumer Product's VP of Sales, Ed Manning, is attending the Future of Business Media event today.  This is the first executive conference focused on the future of the business and trade media industry. 

If you're interested in ways in which NewsGator can help you expand your company's reach, enhance customer engagement and interaction, and increase ad revenue -- all through syndication of content -- you should get in touch with Ed.  He can be reached at edm@newsgator.com.

NewsGator tracks a veritable ton of data every day.  That data, among many other applications, helps us to track how individual clients are doing in terms of their widget strategy and performance.  Every month several of us sit down and go through the past month's "numbers." 

Earlier in the month we reviewed our September numbers.  We put particular focus on widgets that experienced noteworthy upward movement in some of the metrics we track -- such as views, interaction, clickthroughs, etc.  Then we complied a list of best practices that reflect the basis for the positive changes we noticed in these particular widgets.  Some of them may seem quite obvious, but you'd be surprised how often these best practices can be overlooked: 

• Leverage your network to increase content distribution and interaction: consider sharing content with other NewsGator clients in the media industry
• Mash up your data types (text, video, pictures, animation, etc.)
• Put your widgets on article pages and areas to which they are related (i.e., instead of only placing them on section fronts)
• Keep it simple: don't try to do everything with one widget
• Plan ahead when launching time sensitive or seasonal widgets (i.e., Olympics, Election 2008, holidays, etc.)
• Don't hide your widgets; ideally keep them "above the fold."  (You'd be surprised by how many people seem to do their best to obscure hard earned widgets.)
• Avoid the catchall homepage widget; instead, create purpose-built, audience-focused widgets

Have you come across other best practices that have helped your widget campaigns?  If so, leave them in the comments section. 

From the NewsGator Technical Blog:

If you missed this month's Customer Connect Webinar, you can experience it here.

After Andy [Client Services Manager] showed us the how's and why's of time-sensitive widgets and tabbed widget metrics, I [Technical Support Engineer] took over to show how you put auto-rotation into your tabbed widgets, introduced the tech blog, and happily unveiled our new Gigya enhanced sharing.

Using the webinar to announce the tech blog that links back to the webinar... did I just create some kind of info vortex?

Thanks, Jenny!

John Furrier, on his business and technology blog, has a post up regarding our launching branded iPhone applications for companies.  He understands why we at NewsGator are excited about this development and says that our "new service makes sense" because "now companies can leverage their content feeds (plus add others) to deliver a solution to users on the iPhone. By private labeling NewsGator, service companies can deliever a fast iPhone app."

Check out his full post here.

Due to the success of NewsGator's NetNewsWire application for iPhone -- whose milestones I profiled in late September (such as over 200,000 users and more than 130 million marked items) -- we decided that the next natural step would be to build branded, dedicated media apps for the iPhone for our media clients. 

Essentially what we did, as Jeff Nolan, VP of Media & Consumer Products, explains, was "detune NetNewsWire from being a general purpose mobile RSS client to media specific reader apps. This is a very exciting offering for media companies who wish to have an iPhone app that can be used to increase their audience and more fully engage them at the same time."

We have a brand new page up to explain how these branded iPhone applications will work.  The main reason we believe this offering will prove compelling and successful is because they will enable media companies to deliver a branded media experience directly to the over 7 million iPhone users -– providing their audience with one touch, anytime access to their content.

What's more, these iPhone applications we're offering are fully hosted and maintained by NewsGator for rapid deployment, easy management and tracking, and low support costs. These full-featured, powerful apps stand out in the marketplace in that they:

• can contain text, images, audio, and video
• support sponsorships for boosting your advertising revenue
• are created specifically for multiple RSS feeds
• have advanced feed categorization options
• have strong branding potential (you can put your logo on the main page)
• have search capability
• have the power of NewsGator & NetNewsWire behind them

As Jeff says, "media brands have an absolute requirement to extend their presence to the places where people are consuming content and moving out to mobile is a compelling option for any media site, large or small. The iPhone has dramatically reshaped the mobile marketplace and we now have a merchandising mechanism (iTunes) for moving applications to consumers.  However, any mobile application is complex and expensive. It is difficult to hire good iPhone app developers today and the market is competitive, which conspire to make iPhone app development a steep hill to climb for media companies."

But with NewsGator's branded iPhone applications your company can:

• Deliver a branded media experience to iPhone users via a custom, native App
• Market your App on the Apple App Store
• Monetize your App with sponsorships
• Minimize development and support costs with NewsGator’s hosted service
• Provide a superior experience over web Apps by enabling offline features and a richer, faster user experience

You can learn more about these exciting branded iPhone apps here or contact us directly, if interested, at 800-608-4597.