Newsgator

Posted on July 24, 2006
Filed Under Companies, Social Media |

I just spent 2 hours with J.B. Holsten and Greg Reinacker, CEO and CTO of Newsgator. As many of you know, I really admire this company and use both their online service and Feeddemon and NetNewsWire respectively on my Windows and Mac machines. I think their strategy of pursuing best-of-breed on the desktop, and mobiles devices, and using their online service to tie everything together is smart and certainly something I have literally bought into.

What was interesting to learn more about was Newsgator’s private label business and how they are using RSS to facilitate community building initiatives. The personalized site at USA Today is a great example of how this works, enabling visitors to compile a personalized collection of feeds on top of the feeds that USA Today is pushing through the service, whether they be from USA Today properties or not. All of this is powered by Newsgator and enables USA Today to offer a service that competes with My Yahoo or any of the other personalized portal vendors without undertaking a large technology infrastructure initiative themselves, which translates into a service that dramatically lowers risk for the company.

Analytics is clearly a big topic in the blogosphere and Newsgator is evidently aware of the value of their aggregate feed and click through statistics. My immediate reaction was to think about the value of integrating their analytics data with services we are already using, Buzzmetrics and Umbria. The ability to offer “discovery and refinement” services is also an outgrowth of their analytics data, for example, being able to recommend blogs based on subscription and reading patterns. The subject of authority also came up in the discussion because current services that attempt to determine authority use trackback links as a proxy for attention. This is not invalid but it’s just one methodology, whereas Newsgator could in fact offer not just keywords but also actual clickthroughs, which reminded my of what MyBlogLog is doing with communities.

Lastly, while looking at their clipping features in the enterprise server product I was struck by how much this is really an enterprise bookmarking service, otherwise referred to as “del.icio.us behind the firewall”. The major shortcoming in that ambition would be the lack of keyword tags, however users can add comments to clippings so tags should not be a challenge. Again, being able to aggregate this across an enterprise and then apply authority algorithms would result in a service without equal. This reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write a review of Cogenz and Connectbeam, need to get on that.

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