Get ready – here we come.
NewsGator announced three new partnerships yesterday – each which enhances a different aspect of the RSS platform we are building out. Expect a steady stream of announcements over the next two months as the fruit from the first few months of our investment starts to ripen.
In my original post on why we invested in NewsGator, I alluded to the notion that I viewed NewsGator as an RSS platform, not simply a newsreader. While we are moving toward a clearly integrated platform view for all of our products, we’ve decided to release components along the way rather than wait for one “big bang release” (I’ve long been a proponent of both in-line and incremental release approaches, which fits really nicely with some of the Agile development approaches I’ve been exposed to since I invested in Rally Software.)
Each of the partnerships that we have announced exercises a different part of the platform we are building.
The FeedDemon partnership enables FeedDemon users to use our NewsGator Online Services (NGOS) to synchronize their subscription information across machines and devices (desktop, web, mobile, Media Center, Outlook, and other email clients.) Some people may think this is weird since conceivably NewsGator Outlook competes with FeedDemon as a reader. However, we don’t view it that way – we think that some folks want their reader integrated into Outlook (hence NewsGator Outlook), some people want a standalone client-based reader (hence FeedDemon) – so they’ll co-exist (since we have no plans today for a standalone client-based reader.) However, we (and FeedDeemon) agree that everyone potential wants their feeds on any of their machines and devices – we can help make that easy today.
The Moreover partnership brings a superb aggregated news feed service to NewsGator Online Services (NGOS) as well as to our desktop and online products. NGOS already had an awesome set of feeds – it just got a lot better.
The SixApart partnership enables tighter posting integration between NewsGator Outlook and Typepad / Movable Type. While this is relevant for all NewsGator Outlook customers (you can now post directly to Typepad / Movable Type from within Outlook), it is especially compelling for our enterprise customers – as both SixApart and NewsGator expand their enterprise customer base, this integration enables a much easier to manage experience for enterprise (read – large number of users within a corporation) deployments – both by the end-user and the IT organization.
More soon – and thanks to the folks at FeedDemon, Moreover, and SixApart for being great partners.