Category Archives: RSS

FeedDemon 4: definitely worth $20

Posted on December 12, 2010 at 2:25 pm UK

fd4proThe developer of one of the most useful programs I have installed on my computers just issued a major update, which I’ve gladly installed. The program is FeedDemon and version 4 has just been released.

I’ve been using FeedDemon since 2004 – about the time I really discovered the value of RSS – and consider it to be the best RSS application for Windows by far.

I’ve written a great deal in this blog (and in my now-archive blog) about FeedDemon over the past six years. I wrote about the various new versions as they came out and also about NewsGator’s acquisition of developer Nick Bradbury (well, the company that Bradbury headed, certainly) in 20o5 and its integration into NewsGator’s product line.

A lot’s happened in the intervening years including making FD a free application and then, during the version 3 developments, it becoming ad supported with an option to pay to remove the ads. Bradbury parted company with NewsGator in 2009 but he retains rights to develop FeedDemon, and that brings us up to date with the new version 4.

Here’s a summary of six features of FeedDemon:

  • Google Reader Synchronization - Use FeedDemon at home, your office, or anywhere you go and keep your feeds, tags and shared items synched between locations.
  • Sharing – FeedDemon’s simple single-click sharing lets your friends subscribe to your favourite articles.
  • Tagging – Assign your own keywords to items, making it easy to classify and locate articles you’ve previously read.
  • Watches – Tell FeedDemon to let you know when your keywords appear in any feed you’re subscribed to.
  • Search Feeds – Get alerted when your keywords appear in any feed, regardless of whether you’re subscribed to it.
  • Podcasts – Let FeedDemon automatically download audio files and copy them to your iPod or other media device.

See the FAQ for more information.

One big change with version 4 – there are now two version: FeedDemon Lite (free) and FeedDemon Pro ($19.,95 or $9 to upgrade if you already paid for version 3 ad removal). Why? Here’s Bradbury’s explanation:

[...] I had to pay the bills with whatever money FeedDemon generated, and as popular as FeedDemon is, it’s not popular enough to bring in enough cash through ads alone. And very few people were paying just to get rid of the ads (can you blame them?).

For a year I kept FeedDemon free, and I started work on FeedDemon 4.0 in the hopes I could find a way to keep it free yet still pay the bills. But eventually it was clear that the only way to keep FeedDemon (and myself) going was to start charging for it again, and I figured the best way to do that was to come out with a free ad-supported Lite version with fewer features, along with a for-pay Pro version that had all the features and no ads. That way there would still be a free version, which I knew had to exist, while at the same time there would be a way I could charge for a more feature-rich version.

I just bought a license for FeedDemon Pro. I first bought a license way back during version 1.x (when it cost almost $30). I’m more than happy to still pay for a tool that’s evolved and improved hugely over time and one I consider to be extremely useful if not indispensible, as well as support an indie software developer who makes a great product.

And $20 (about £12.65 or €12.15 at the moment) is amazing value for a tool that lets you do so much. If you haven’t tried it, why not give it a go?

Five stories for the holiday weekend

Posted on May 29, 2010 at 8:22 am UK

greader[1]

Ever since I started blogging back in 2002, I have always found RSS to be one of the most useful tech tools ever invented.

RSS enables me, you, anyone, to automatically receive new or updated content from anywhere on the web, right on your desktop, laptop or mobile device without having to lift a finger to go and find it. All you need is a feed reader and you’re set. I recommend FeedDemon for Windows and Google Reader on the web (and the mobile version for mobile devices).

So here are five stories from the news, commentaries and opinion that I get in the the RSS feeds I subscribe to, shared via my link blog, that especially stand out to me at the start of this holiday weekend:

PostRank Brings Real-Time Social Monitoring to Your Blog
PostRank Analytics, a service that captures social engagement and traditional metrics in one dashboard, in launching a new beta feature called PostRank Activity Streams. PostRank describes Activity Streams as “FriendFeed for content.” In other words, an ever-changing overview of what is happening… /continue… [I use PostRank: you can see an example of one of its services in the 'Top Posts' list in the blog sidebar.]

Non-Profit Uses Foursquare to Raise Environmental Awareness
Earthjustice, a non-profit public interest law firm, has blanketed San Francisco BART trains with posters that instruct riders to check in to the “Earthjustice ad” on Foursquare to help the firm raise money to support its wildlife protection initiatives. The posters take a critical look at e… /continue…

YouTube’s Must-See CSR Picks
Cause marketing isn’t new to YouTube. But some are doing it better than others. Here’s a look at five videos YouTube says companies should watch before launching a corporate social responsibility campaign on the website. /continue…

World Cup Soccer Players Stopped From Using Social Media
In the age of transparency, one workers’ union leader has already ruffled feathers by tweeting updates from negotiations with employers. Now, some soccer sides participating in this summer’s upcoming World Cup 2010 don’t want their tactics s… /continue…

Beyond Beta: Microsoft Tag Takes Off
It has been 18 months since we launched Microsoft Tag, Microsoft’s mobile barcode technology. In that time, more than one billion Tags have been printed by people and businesses all over the world. In the month of April alone, more than 20 million magazines with Tags were in the hands of U…. /continue… [Think also about how mobile barcodes like this can be useful in other areas, eg, business cards.]

[Google Reader icons by super-structure, used under CC.]

Five stories for Friday

Posted on April 30, 2010 at 7:37 am UK

greader Content that arrived in my RSS reader this morning presents many interesting things that are going on in business, communication and technology. And so little time to comment on them today other than in passing.

While I share links to content I find interesting in my Google Reader account (aka my link blog which you can subscribe to), I wanted to note some of that content here, as much a marker for my own reference as it might be of interest to you.

So here are five stories for Friday, each with a link to the full content on the originating website. Enjoy.

50,000 Websites Have Already Integrated Facebook’s New Social Plugins
There’s no question that Facebook’s new social plugins — which include a ‘Like’ button for the web and an array of other widgets — have been adopted at a pretty amazing rate (we had our ‘Like’ buttons live the day they were announced). /continue… [I’ve also added a Facebook ‘like’ button to this blog, which appears at the end of each post. It’s produced by the fbLikeButton plugin for WordPress, the easiest way I found to implement the button without having to do any coding in the blog templates.]

Why Does LinkedIn Keep Doing Things That Don’t Make Sense?
LinkedIn launched a new feature today that has tons of promise: the ability to follow new hires, departures, job postings and more at particular companies. […] Unfortunately, the implementation is a big disappointment. The condescending, pageview hungry attitude that colors so much of what LinkedIn does is all over this new feature as well. I’ve recorded a short screencast tour of the feature below. Let me know if this drives you as nuts as it does me. /continue…

New Report Details the State of Twitter [STATS]
A recent report on Twitter usage in the U.S. by Edison Research concludes that 87% of all Americans are now aware of Twitter — up from 5% in 2008 — but only 7% of the population actually use it. […] Edison also finds that mobile usage is a key component of Twitter’s value proposition and that users are more likely to update and access Twitter via mobile devices than other social networking sites. One in five Twitter users update Twitter via their mobile devices several times per day; one in three do so at least once daily. /continue…

Tim Ferriss: 7 Great Principles for Dealing with Haters
Dealing with negativity online can be tough, which was why we were all ears when Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week, took the stage at The Next Web ‘10 event in Amsterdam to discuss how to learn to love haters. […] 1. It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do. “It’s critical in social media, as in life, to have a clear objective and not to lose sight of that,” Ferriss says. He argues that if your objective is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people or to change the world in some small way (be it through a product or service), you only need to pick your first 1,000 fans — and carefully. “As long as you’re accomplishing your objectives, that 1,000 will lead to a cascading effect,” Ferriss explains. “The 10 million that don’t get it don’t matter.” /continue…

Another Hotel Fails To Support Skype – Here’s Why Skype’s P2P Connection Model Breaks Their System
Summary: Hotels restricting the number of simultaneous network connections per user may wind up blocking legitimate usage of Skype. Skype’s peer-to-peer network model uses a high number of network connections to synchronize multi-party group chats. /continue…

[Google Reader icons by super-structure, used under CC.]

Stories for starting the weekend

Posted on March 6, 2010 at 7:54 am UK

rss-sm When I’m desk bound early in the mornings, my habit is tea with RSS. Today is no exception, and a quiet perusal through my 100 or so subscriptions in FeedDemon produced quite a few gems, all of which I share in my link blog.

Here’s a dozen of the best for starting the weekend:

Google’s App Store for Business to Launch Next Week. Google is set to launch an app store for business next week, Mashable has learned from sources close to the company. It will be focused around creating software for Google Apps and could launch as soon as Tuesday.

Do People Tweet About Brands More Out of Hate Than Love? The presence of two media brands – the BBC and BET – on this week’s Top 10 Most Tweeted Brands chart raises some interesting questions about why people tend to tweet about brands

New York City police to issue press passes to bloggers. This week New York City Law Department issued press passes to bloggers for the first time. In its new rules, to be adopted by the New York police department, will “expressly incorporate online-only media such as blogs”. The changes follow a lawsuit filed in November of 2008 that challen…

Apple Confirms iPad Arrival In April. Despite fears over possible delays, Apple has today confirmed that the Wi-Fi-only model of its iPad tablet will go on sale in the United States from 3 April, while British users will have to wait until late April for the Wi-Fi and 3G version of the device. Apple also took the opportunity to conf…

#BeMyGuest – a call to guest bloggers. Journalism.co.uk is taking part in #BeMyGuest – a month-long initiative to encourage bloggers to swap posts. Set up by PRs Adam Vincenzini and Emily Cagle, the criteria for participating are simple. You must: Write at least one post for someone else’s blog; Feature at least one guest… [I’m interested, too, in taking part.]

Toyota’s reputation slowly recovers, YouGov perception tracker reveals. Toyota’s long-term brand damage may not as bad as initially feared, according to polling data from YouGov.

Steep Rise Predicted For Touchscreen Mobile Devices. More and more users are likely to opt for touchscreen mobile devices, after Gartner predicted that sales of touchscreen mobile devices in 2010 will grow 96.8 percent over 2009 sales. The IT resarch firm expects the worldwide touchscreen mobile device market to top 362.7 million units in 2010, a…

iPhone apps compared – how do news publishers shape up? The news industry buzzword of the year so far is just three letters long: “app”. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters are falling over themselves to grab a slice of the burgeoning mobile app economy, led to a huge degree by Apple’s iPhone. But how developed is the news and publishing ..

Location-based services on mobile phones: Follow me. Adverts that know where you are could be lucrative—not to mention controversial. The initiative was designed to draw attention to a serious issue and it achieved its goal. Pleaserobme.com is a simple website that publishes a live feed of posts that appear on Twitter, a microblogging service, showi…

India’s Twitter SMS GupShup Gets An App Store. Fresh off a $12 million investment, SMS GupShup, a Twitter-like service in India that is primarily accessed via SMS, is launching an App Store. The store aims to expand SMS GupShup’s ecosystem by allowing developers to create SMS-based mobile applications based off of the microblogging service…

FT plans PayPal option for online news. The Financial Times is to begin trialling PayPal, the electronic payments service owned by Ebay, for daily or weekly access to FT.com, which at present charges an annual subscription…

Rise of social networking killing off loyalty to news brands. The increasingly large role that social networks are playing in how people get their news is killing off loyalty to individual news organisations, according to a major US study.

RSS, Twitter and lifestreaming: Is there an engagement somewhere?

Posted on September 8, 2009 at 12:24 pm UK

Quite a bit of buzz today over the news from Matt Mullenweg that WordPress.com supports RSS Cloud, a new development in the evolution of RSS.

Created by Dave Winer, RSS Cloud basically involves the push-notification to subscribers of your RSS feed that there’s new content available.

rsscloudschema254 Dave Winer’s diagram shows the concept very clearly, and he’s written an easy-to-understand RSS Cloud walkthrough.

The key word here is ‘push.’ Unlike standard RSS which polls your subscriptions on a timed schedule – the default in most RSS services is once an hour – RSS Cloud will let you know of new or updated content the instant it’s published.

So why should you care about this, especially as there’s only one RSS reader the service works with at the moment – River2, also from Dave Winer?

Well, the idea of no longer having to wait for content is what would appeal to me, especially if it gives me an edge in some way. That edge could be as simple as hearing about news or information on something my friends are saying, to getting informed about a business deal before my competitors do, the instant that new information is posted or sent.

You can think up other advantages.

It’s a bit like how Twitter works, isn’t it? You write a tweet, hit send, it goes instantly to the cloud and out to your followers via whatever means they prefer – the web, desktop apps, mobile apps, even via RSS.

I think the appeal of the RSS Cloud service would be amplified hugely if you could use a single app or service to receive all or part (you choose) of the content that interests you, whether it’s via RSS, Twitter, from social networking sites like Facebook, or wherever.

More significantly, you’d be able to interact with that content in a single location, ie, the app or service you use. No more jumping from app to app.

We’re already seeing such service integration in Twitter applications like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop – just two examples – which let you run multiple Twitter accounts and bring in content from your Facebook account, which you can then interact with, all in a single application.

There are also services like Friendfeed that do similar things via the web (although the future still isn’t wholly clear for Friendfeed following its acquisition by Facebook last month) and newer ones like Posterous.

Is this really just a way of seeing how lifestreaming is evolving? And if I’m saying that the RSS Cloud suggests an engagement with Twitter, what’s next? The marriage?

Let’s not rush things. We’d need to see if and how an engagement is going to work – and whether the partners are genuinely compatible – before any serious commitment.

Btw, if you run self-hosted WordPress, you can try it out right now – there’s an RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress. Not sure what you’d be trying out (would someone let me know?), but you’ll be at the edge already.