Part of the beauty of the contemporary Internet application is the notion of an open API (Application Programming Interface). NewsGator released their NewsGator Online API today. FeedBurner released their Feed Management API last week and their Feed Awareness API several weeks ago which are both documented in depth on the site under FeedBurner for Developers. Last week, Technorati released their Technorati Blog Post Tags API.
APIs have been around forever, but they historically have been complex, proprietary, difficult to use, and require tight coupling with a desktop application. Back when I first started writing commercial software, I used Btrieve (made by SoftCraft at the time) as my database engine and spent a lot of time messing around with the API to figure out how to make it work the way I wanted to. Of course, whenever I upgraded my programming environment, I had to wait for the API library upgrade, which never worked correctly with my legacy applications, which then caused me to waste even more time messing around with the API library.
One of the famous early PC APIs was the MS-DOS BIOS API. Quick – without looking – what did INT 19h do? By the time the Win32 API came along, I was done programming, but I hear it was a lot of fun to work with.
Today, virtually every popular web application has (or is rolling out) an API. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay have led the way, but newer web apps such as Flickr, EVDB, and del.icio.us are right there with them. Of course, in classic Internet fashion, each large company has their own name for them (web services anyone?) but API captures it for me.
As part of the NewsGator Online API release, NewsGator has created a sample application that uses their API. I’ve seen several posts recently about how “easy” it is to create an aggregator – we’ll – yeah – a simple one is easy. NewsGator has a sample 3–pane aggregator with full sync support that was created in a couple of hours. If you have a NewsGator Online account, give it a whirl – when you play with it, recognize that all the back end activity is done using the NewsGator Online system. FeedBurner has several good examples up, including the Podnova FeedBurner 40 top podcasts (by subscribers) and the number of subscribers on a each feed on Podfeed.net that uses FeedBurner.
Click on the appropriate link for the complete NewsGator API, FeedBurner API, or Technorati API.
Quova has started a blog on “the impact of real-world geography on the way business is conducted on the Internet” called The 37th Parallel that is hosted on AlwaysOn. I posted an article titled IP Geolocation – Investing in Insight that talks briefly about my first encounter with the notion of “IP Geolocation”, the origin of my investment in Quova, and the evolution of IP Geolocation from a clever, gimmicky idea in 1999 to a technology that is now at the core of a wide variety of Internet-based applications.
NewsGator announced the NewsGator Enterprise Server this week. Ross Carlson (my superstud IT guy) installed Beta 2 this week – I think it’s awesome. When I first invested in NewsGator a year ago, I bought into Greg Reinacker’s vision of RSS as a platform technology and NewsGator as the platform company for providing RSS reader capability. At the time, there was a some emerging buzz around RSS, but over the past year it has picked up incredible speed and is now working its way into mainstream and enterprise computing.
NewsGator Enterprise Server is another component of a product roadmap that Greg laid out in February which includes the web (NewsGator Online), Microsoft Outlook (NewsGator Outlook Edition), Desktop (NewsGator FeedDemon Edition – via our acquisition of Nick Bradbury’s company and superb product), Mobile (yeah … Mobile Edition), Private Label Edition (e.g VNU France and Denver Post News Hound), Microsoft Media Center (NewsGator Media Center Edition), and now Microsoft Exchange and the enterprise (via NewsGator Enterprise Server).
NewsGator Enterprise Server features include:
In addition, NewsGator is paying attention and addressing a bunch of prospective RSS-related security issues. Brian Livingston – editor of Windows Secrets – has a great article up on this where he highlights the potential security issues with podcasts and how NewsGator’s FeedStation product handles the issues effectively.
NewsGator has some material available on the web site, including a product overview, business white paper, technical white paper, and data sheet. The projected release date for NewsGator Enterprise Server is current 9/30/05. However, given the stability of Beta 2, I expect to see a release candidate shortly. If you have interest in being in the beta program and/or being an early adopter, feel free to drop me an email and I’ll get you connected with the right folks at NewsGator.
On Monday, Gold Systems announced the release of the Gold Systems Speech-Powered Password Reset product, based on Microsoft Speech Server 2004 R2. This is a product Gold Systems has been working on for a while, building on their experience with speech, password reset, and call center applications. Microsoft has been putting plenty of energy behind their new Speech Server products with a recent unveiling at SpeechTEK this week.
The idea of automated password reset has been around for a while as the cost of staffing a help desk to deal with password reset issues within a company can grow to be silly pretty fast. Speech-based password reset is a highly secure and inexpensive way to address this issue. I’ve been close to the development of Gold Systems’ product and I think it’s awesome, especially given the tight integration with Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP.
Gold Systems has run an early adopter program for the past few months (deeper than a traditional beta) and the product has been received very well. One of the developers – Jason Groshart – has been blogging about the development of this product and the use of Rally Software’s Agile development tools (Rally – like Gold Systems – is one of my portfolio companies).
Dave Sifry – the CEO of Technorati – has published his latest State of the Blogosphere in two posts: Part 1: Blog Growth and Part 2: Posting Volume – that looks at the growth of the Blogosphere over the past six months. Some fun facts (as of July 30, 2005) follow:
Dave has more coming this week (Part 3 – coming tomorrow – includes the growth of tagging).
Greg Reinacker has a tease up about NewsGator Enterprise Server, which is currently in beta and marching quickly toward release. Pretty (and satisfying) graph)
We’ve gotten a lot of help from Microsoft in their test labs – thanks guys.
Spam is one of the flagship members of the Internet Axis of Evil – it sucks worse than War of the Worlds. I’ve been supporting the war against spam through my investments in Postini and Return Path and I plan to continue to do whatever I can to help eradicate this scourge from Planet Internet.
While it would be nice if spam just disappeared, it’s not going to anytime soon. So – in addition to attacking spam, it’s time to really address the “legitimate email issue.” Return Path has been after this for a while and just released a new version of their email delivery monitoring tools. Today – TRUSTe (a non-profit dedicated to online privacy issues) launched an “Email Privacy Seal Program” – members of this program can confidently say “We Don’t Spam.”
As I’ve gotten deeper in to the spam issue, it’s clear that it’s needs to be addressed from both sides. The obvious side – prevent the bad shit – is what the anti-spam companies like Postini do. The less obvious side – allow the good stuff through (which also includes “tell consumers who is good and who is bad”) is becoming more central to the war. Return Path and TRUSTe are doing good things around this.
About every three months I hear someone say “RSS will eliminate email (implying that the spam issue will go away).” This is a ridiculous construct – Matt Blumberg the CEO of Return Path has several good posts on this so I’ll refer to him rather than repeat what he has to say. But – Matt gets it – he knows email, knows RSS, knows online marketing, and – well – generally has a clue. If you care about this issue, you should pay attention to what he’s up to and what he’s thinking.
Of course – spam has moved well beyond email at this point. My email spam issue completely under control because of the magic of Postini. However, I get between 50 and 100 comment and trackback spams on a good day (and several hundred on a bad day). My tools for this suck – SixApart is promising new happiness in MT 3.2, but for the time being I’m struggling along with the MT-Blacklist plug-in. Michael Parekh tells an entertaining story of the ineptness of my blog when he tried to comment.
While the world would be better if jerks didn’t feel compelled to write software that posted crap like:
URL: https://ceramics-tiles.blogspot.com
Title: מטבחים
Weblog: מטבחים
Excerpt:
Tell us what you like about the מטבחים events and what you think would make them even better. You are the key to making your <a href=’https://ceramics-tiles.blogspot.com’>מטבחים</a>…
to my blog, having lived through the last 10 years of the email spam wars, I accept that we’ll have continued fun with all sorts of new variants. Ironically, I recognize that this helps power the “technology perpetual machine” – I guess that’s just something we have to live with.
So, earlier tonight, I turned to Amy with a twinkle in my eye and watched as she stared intently at something that looked suspiciously like Typepad on her monitor. The following conversation ensued:
Brad: “Hey, Atom 1.0 is out.”
Amy: “Adam Who?”
Brad: “Atom 1.0 – the new feed format.”
Amy: “I thought that was RSS.”
Brad: “Yeah, yeah, there’s this other format called Atom that … (long unnecessary technical explanation followed).”
Amy: “Uh huhnnnhh”
Brad: “Stop playing with your blog – this is important.”
Amy: “So – what does it mean – what do I have to do differently?”
Brad: “Heheh – nothing – because you use FeedBurner and they automagically will format your feed for Atom 1.0 if it makes sense.”
Amy: “Brad – you are such a nerd.” (As she continued typing on her computer).
I was a little surprised she didn’t say “What was wrong with the last version of Atom?” – this from a woman who regularly says “Damnit – DOS was good enough – why doesn’t Shift-F7 Y exit Word?”
BMC Software – a company that has been around for 25 years and has a major software footprint – announced today that they are using Rally Software’s lifecycle management software and Agile consulting services. This follows Rally’s announcements last week around Release 5 of their Agile software lifecycle management product.
While BMC and Rally just announced this deal, BMC has been using Rally since the end of last year and the rollout and implementation has been superb. The BMC announcement is a big deal – it’s the first of several major software companies to have adopted Rally’s software tools.