Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon and Topstyle, will now be working for Newsgator. He explains the move in this post on his blog.
Nick explains that the idea behind this move was born out of his support forums. Basically, his customers wanted the ability to use the desktop aggregator, FeedDemon, on multiple machines. Nick’s license permits (and encourages) this, and many users have the aggregator installed on an office machine, a home machine, and perhaps a laptop. Nick writes:
As regular visitors to my support forums know, the biggest request - by far - that FeedDemon customers have had is the ability to synchronize their subscriptions between multiple computers. They use FeedDemon on one PC at home, on another at the office, on a laptop while traveling, etc., and they want their feeds to be synched between them.
If someone reads an item on one computer, it shouldn’t show up as unread on another computer. And when they subscribe to a feed, it should automatically appear on any computer they use. Basically, provide the convenience of a web-based aggregator with the power and speed of a Windows desktop application.
I toyed with various hack-ish ways to do this, and even considered creating my own web-based sync service, but in the end came to the conclusion that to really do this right, I needed to join forces with someone who already had the server-side piece in place.
This has been one of my biggest complaints with using the desktop aggregator, but I just dealt with it, simply because I like the speed and customization that FeedDemon provides. From the sound of Nick’s enthusiasm, it appears that this will be a great deal for him and his customers. With the acqusition, current FeedDemon users (like me) are going to come out pretty good:
NewsGator uses a subscription model, and FeedDemon will become part of their subscription plans. All existing FeedDemon customers will get a two-year business standard subscription for free - and this includes upgrades to FeedDemon. In other words, if you’ve already bought FeedDemon, you’ll get brand new versions of FeedDemon and a subscription to NewsGator Online free for the next two years.
Nick is currently working on a 1.5.1 beta, and I’ll try it out as soon as it is available. As you can imagine, there are plenty of folks upset with the move, and many have voiced their concern in the comments on his blog. I am not going to weigh in just yet, as I would like to wait and see how things develp. In the meantime, good luck to Nick on “entering this new chapter” in his life and the life of FeedDemon.
mStoner.com has a good article about colleges that blog to recruit potential students:
In seizing on the blogging phenomenon, admissions offices and alumni associations are benefiting from the freshness and honesty that the very medium of blogging suggests. There’s an immediacy to blogging, an unvarnished reality to it–even when the feedback function is disabled and the cast of bloggers has clearly been engineered. This aura may fade over time, but for now, it’s potent.
Colleges and universities are competing fiercely to get a good crop of students. With the price of tuition increasing and the nature of today’s economy, colleges that want to make their numbers must aggressively recruit students. One of the important things that perspective students need to know when choosing a school is what life is like at the institution on a daily basis. Blogs can allow students to hear about a school from a student’s perspective:
In admissions, student bloggers write about their experiences. The feedback function is typically disabled; prospective students can contact the bloggers via email. Having chosen their bloggers carefully, admissions offices do not edit the entries–which is, admittedly, a risk. But well worth it: while it’s difficult to pin down the exact impact on applications, colleges and universities say that site traffic increases significantly when blogs are implemented.
Starting at about 8 a.m. yesterday, we have been experiencing an interesting lesson about our dependence on (or addiction to) technology. Yesterday morning, one of the raid arrays malfunctioned on one of then main campus servers. The server that was impacted held faculty, staff, and student net id and email information. As a result, nothing worked. Email, Blackboard, and Remote Storage were all down. If I had a quarter for every time I answered, “Yes, email is down—Sorry—All we have been told is that it’s a big problem and they are working on it”, I could have bought me an iPod.
Students, faculty, and staff were all beside themselves with frustration, wondering how they could possibly get by without being ‘plugged in.’ I have to admit that I too was upset by the inconvenience. I was waiting to receive some email quotes from vendors, and I had some much needed files stored in my sentmail on the server. (IMAP is a beautiful thing, unless of course, the server goes belly up). I had a couple of email reference questions that I should have answered on Wednesday, but I had put them off to ponder an appropriate answer. I could go on and on about how much work I missed, but after a while, it just got funny. To put it in perspective, I was one of 20,000 people on this campus, and we were all as equally inconvenienced. I started trying to be a little witty when answering the ‘what is wrong with email’ question. I even considered telling the students, “Hey, our university president is without email right now, too.”
It’s rather scary (and enlightening) to see how much we depend on being plugged in. Technology has definitely changed the way we do things, and it has drastically changed the ways in which we communicate and learn. In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to take the things we use everyday for granted. When you are forced to go without something for a while, you have time to reflect upon the item’s importance and your dependence on the item. For example, I had a guy ask me, “I printed something out here last night. I was wondering if you could look on your print server to see if that document is still there, because I can’t get to my email or remote storage.” Many other students, faculty, and staff were just as desperate, all jonesing for their email fix. I know that I must have tried to log on a hundred times, each time with the hope of getting my fix.
The campus tech guys seem to have fixed the problem, and email has slowly been trickling in this morning. Yesterday I told my colleagues that after missing a full day of email, when email returned it would be like Christmas with tons of day-old email goodies to sift through. Now that email service has returned, I have gotten my fix. It actually does not feel like Christmas, although I do feel relieved (and perhaps a little cursed) to be connected again.
Last week I ended one of my library instruction classes with a spur-of-the-moment survey by asking how many students in the class had used our Ask-A-Librarian service. Four students raised their hands. I then asked how many students used IM, and nearly every one of the 25 students raised their hands. I asked them if they would consider IMing a librarian if our library had its own IM account. Most agreed that they would IM the library, and many believed that using IM would be easier than VR, because they are already familiar with IM software. One of my colleagues attended the session to watch me teach, and she left convinced that our library needs to try an IM reference program. We are looking at launching a pilot program for IM reference in the fall. To get staff ready, I am having them sign up for both Yahoo! and AIM accounts, and we are installing Trillian as our IM client. In the daily interaction of the office, we are getting practice with the software, and some staff members are sending files over IM. It will take some time before everyone jumps on board, but by fall, I hope to have our entire staff crazy about IM.
