Archive for September 28th, 2006
I previously posted about the news from Jason Calacanis about Weblogs Inc. making their sites render nicely on mobile devices and how this is very cool but presents a challenge for mobile clients… you can read more here and at the::unwired.
Here is what I plan to do about this in the next version of NewsGator Go! Currently, you can turn on mobile formatting for all your feeds. In this case, I am using Skweezer to transcode all web content external to my app (links to the original article, links to other articles, etc).
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So, if I subscribe to blogs that behave nicely and render properly for mobile, the transcoding is going to jack things up. Sites like the::unwired and Engadget get penalized for doing the right thing.  So, what I will be able to do is turn on/off transcoding at a more granular level on a feed by feed basis. That is pretty cool.
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So, with these check boxes now in the UI it creates some extra clutter and uses valuable real estate. No worries though… just click on the “Mobile Formatting†menu option and the check boxes go bye bye. I know this isn’t the perfect solution. The user still has to go in and enable/disable formatting at a feed level but it at least provides a valuable option. Hope this helps!
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September 28th, 2006
Robert Young at GigaOm posted about Rupert Murdoch’s likely move into blogging to complement the social networking hit MySpace… I think that is inevitable.
Robert talks about the challenges facing the newspaper industry and how blogging is one of the major disruptors.
“Simply put, it’s centralized content production and distribution vs. decentralized people media. I have now learned, first hand, how blogging competes with traditional newsprint reporting and publishing.â€
There is one point that Robert doesn’t address with respect to blogging’s threat to newspapers. I was riding the bus to work this morning and of the 50 or so people on the bust I’d say 15 or so were reading the newspaper. One person was consuming RSS – that would be me and I was using NewsGator Go! of course. Mobile consumption of RSS is critical to blogging’s ultimate success and ubiquity.
There are several options for consuming RSS on the go, Bloglines Mobile, Dave Winer’s River of News, mobile formatted blogs like Engadget, etc. My favorite is NewsGator Go! - I am a bit biased suprise… suprise… like a newspaper, when I am done reading articles in NewsGator Go! those articles are purged (if I choose) from NewsGator’s RSS synchronization engine and will not show up when I get to the office and fire up FeedDemon. That synchronization is absolutely critical to my mobile RSS experience.
Regardless of your choice for consuming RSS on your mobile device, please spread the word. If those folks on the bus could get the news they wanted when they wanted on their mobile devices, I am sure they would have not bothered buying the old school newspaper. This is good for the RSS space and good for you the consumer!
September 28th, 2006
Our CEO at NewsGator, JB, sent me a link to a post on Jason Calacanis’s blog about his dev team and their efforts to properly render versions of the Weblogs Inc. sites for mobile devices. This is very cool - I just took a look at Engadget on my Windows Mobile device and it looks great.  I subscribe to Jason’s blog so would probably have gotten to this post eventually, but it is pretty amazing to have a CEO who is so in touch with & on top of what is going on in the RSS/mobile space… that is very cool as well.
Anyway, like I said, this achievement is great for the mobile space but creates an interesting dilemma for mobile clients that are already trying to solve the same problem. Let me elaborate… in NewsGator Go! I use Skweezer’s (or Google’s) transcoding proxy to format web pages for mobile friendly viewing (Bloglines does this as well). So if you are consuming RSS feeds in NewsGator Go! and want to spawn a browser to dig into an article, the page is formatted for mobile and for the 90+% of sites that aren’t mobile friendly this is a great thing. For the small percentage of sites that do render properly on mobile, the transcoding foobars all the work they have done (the default page is run through the transcoder and all the publisher’s mobile goodness is lost). Arne and the good folks at the::unwired have noted this as well.
This is an interesting problem that needs a creative solution. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
September 28th, 2006
About three years ago I met Lance through our wives who had recently become friends. Lance was working at IZZE, at the time a 5 or so person beverage startup working out of a cool old house in downtown Boulder. Lance said they were about to revamp their web site. Being a passionate developer ready to take on any project (I was all about mobile and client/server apps not a web dev or designer by any stretch I should add), I said I could help. I met Lance and Todd the CEO (who was actually doing the site himself in FrontPage - impressive undertaking for a CEO) and shortly after that started building their site. I was learning ASP.NET and Web programming all at the same time and after many weekends, all-nighters, and late nights, I had a pretty cool CMS and web site built. I wasn’t over the top amazing, but it was good and allowed them to update & maintain their site without any html or web knowledge.
After starting to work at NewsGator, 7 or so months ago, I really slacked at supporting IZZE’s site, and they rightfully started shopping around for a “real” web design firm. They hooked up with Zing Studios - a company started by a really good dude and smart guy, Jeff shroeder. Jeff and I had worked on some projects in the past, and he is solid. It was a good match, as I had no extra cycles for IZZE.
The IZZE site as it exists today looks pretty much exactly the same as the one I had built (with a ton of help from my buddy Matthias Eder I need to mention). So, maybe I’d like to think I played a small part in the IZZE/Pepsi deal… imagine if Pepsi was doing diligence and stumbled across a FrontPage site built by the CEO. They probably would have been impressed with the CEO’s passion but maybe turned off by a rough looking site. Now, if I only had gotten some stock out of the deal, I may be planning a trip or something cool like that 
I did get some t-shirts and lots of drinks so at least I have that going for me ;(
September 28th, 2006
