Glassboard, which will open to the public next month, will allow iOS and Android users to share text, photos and in some cases location with small groups. It is built with Microsoft Azure as its back-end and will integrate with Microsoft's forthcoming Office 365. The team is being intentionally "agnostic" about its target market, saying it could be used by families, work teams or companies and their clients. These guys have built some incredible things in the past and it will be very interesting to see what they can bring to one of the biggest potential markets of the day.

Past Performance...

Success in social software 1.0 does not always mean that subsequent projects will be winners, too. More than a year ago we wrote here about the latest creation of mega-successful social software entrepreneur Mark Fletcher, creator of Yahoo Groups and Newsgator competitor Bloglines. A year ago he launched a service called SnapGroups, which I said was well aimed at one of the key trends of our time: real-time group communication.

SnapGroups is now nowhere to be found: offline, no Tweets, no blog posts, nothing. It was a cool little service it just didn't seem to have wings. "It just never caught on," Fletcher told me today. "In hindsight, I maybe should have focused on mobile, but that space got crowded quick, so who knows." So it goes sometimes, even for some of the smartest and most innovative people online.
Glassboard will use a freemium model, will be available for consumers and enterprises and isn't talking about its business model yet.

Was this group's work on RSS readers a failure? Newsgator's CEO J.B. Holston says the company's RSS apps, most of which have now been sold-off to smaller companies that are enthusiastic about developing them further, may not have turned into Twitter but they did change the web and a lot of peoples' lives.

My take on it is this, and I'll try to say this without getting too upset about it: the lack of uptake of RSS reading software by consumers and businesses is among the turns of events in recent technology history that's most disparaging of the state of humanity. That a personalized, centralized repository for updates from dynamic streams of information delivered by free trusted sources of democratic publishing all over the world has had its tech-lunch eaten by mind-rotting casual Flash games on Facebook is as depressing as the way that public education dreams were dashed when the promise of television became its reality. It's like the psychedelic dreams of Harvard's Dr. Timothy Leary becoming the wretched, heartbreaking narcotic drama of the TV show The Wire. It's terrible. It's reason to pack it all up and go home.

But that's not what the team of RSS reader forefathers are doing. Instead they are getting the band back together again and tackling the next frontier. It will be exciting to see what they come up with.

This move probably makes a lot of sense for NewsGator, as the company can now focus more on working with its enterprise and government customers. Running an online RSS reader is pretty resource intensive. For the most part, NewsGator was only duplicating Google Reader's features anyway, though it did offer a number of features that Google doesn't yet offer in its online RSS reader.

The most important part of the announcement actually comes at the end of the FAQ about the transition. NewsGator argues that its enterprise products have grown at a record pace in the last 18 months. The company also announced that its Social Sites product already has over a million paying users. Under these circumstances, offering a free online news reader probably didn't make any sense for NewsGator anymore.

Free Desktop Readers Will Live On

It's important to note that the company will continue to develop and support its free desktop and mobile readers, though NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile will no longer be available for consumers after August 31. NewsGator's browser toolbar and desktop notifier will also be discontinued.

According to NewsGator's Brent Simmons:

"The idea behind TapLynx is that you can take a collection of feeds and some artwork, make choices about colors and gradients and behavior (all in a configuration file you edit), then create an iPhone app. Without doing any programming.

But you can do programming if you want to -- use TapLynx as the base and add more features. (In fact, that's what I'm doing with NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone -- it's a custom app built on TapLynx.)"

Being able to rapidly develop customizable and unique iPhone apps with no need to learn Cocoa is great news to those of us who are interested in building such apps, but know very little about developing them. We are anxiously awaiting for TapLynx to make its way out of beta, but meanwhile you can sign up for the SDK here and the company will let us know when it becomes available. Be sure to follow @taplynx on Twitter.

Powered by Newsgator

USA.gov chose Newsgator as its technology provider for this service. While we have had our doubts about the sustainability of enterprise RSS services, this is definitely a nice win for a company that we would definitely like to see succeed. Because of this integration with Newsgator's services, you can also easily put a widget with relevant government information on your own site.

An RSS reader like illumio could have a real shot at marketshare among the digerati if not for a few issues. The app, more of a competitor to the Newsgator desktop reader product line than to online readers, provides automatic filtering of your news feeds. Unlike technologies like AideRSS, which filters by popularity, illumio personalizes your feed reading experience by determining what's important to you and then displaying those top articles in a newspaper layout.

Illumio is not new, but its latest incarnation - illumio version 3.0 - was only released a couple of weeks ago. With this version, the app, although downloadable software, now launches within a web browser window. The UI has also been completely redesigned so articles are easier to read and navigation is simplified.

illumio

However, what's really interesting about illumio is not the fact that you can read your RSS in a newspaper layout - it's the built-in filtering technologies the software employs to do so. In order to determine your interests, illumio scans the files on your computer to discover your interests and expertise. Not to worry, though - this information is never shared with others, nor does it ever leave your PC, according to the company. The privacy-conscious set might find that a little bit disconcerting, but you have to admit - that's certainly a unique approach to uncovering someone's interests in order to personalize their news.

Using illumio

When configuring the software for the first time, you must initially specify some default interests, but after completing the configuration you can remove any unwanted feeds and upload your own OPML file. (It's too bad you can't just start with an OPML upload, though.)

Once you're up-and-running, your feeds are displayed in a newspaper layout that features a tag cloud of topics on the right and your feed groups on the left. You can rate articles with star ratings to further train illumio as to what you like.

There's also a tab at the top of the newspaper called "Questions," because, if it wasn't enough that illumio was a filtered RSS reader of sorts, it's also trying to be a Q&A service, too. Here you can ask questions and respond to those posed by others in the community. While that might be useful in a business environment where team members review feeds together and then discuss as a group, it's hard to see exactly how this would really benefit a typical user.

Recommendation Alone Doesn't Ensure Success

Unfortunately for illumio, their great strides in improving recommendation technologies are going to be overlooked by the community they wish to engage for two major reasons: 1) it's downloadable software, 2) it's Windows only.

While they are working on a Mac version (sign up here to be notified of its release), the fact that illumio is a software download is going to be a huge turn-off for many users. Those at illumio maintain that the reason for it being a download is due to privacy concerns - since it scours your hard drive to assist with its recommendation and filtering services, you wouldn't necessarily want that private data stored online. That being said, most users are looking for filtering and recommendation to occur within their web apps, so illumio doesn't have a chance at converting anyone beyond the already small niche of desktop reader fans.

Instead, Try Newsgator Online

By partnering with a company called SenseArray, NewsGator Online is now offering RSS feed recommendations to its users. These recommendations come from the data NewsGator had been collecting en masse from their users as well as from an individual's actions - like a thumbs up or thumbs down - that were performed in their desktop reader (either FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for the Mac).

This latest news comes on the heels of last month's announcement about Newsgator's incorporation of our favorite filtering service, AideRSS. While both of these technologies are currently only available in Newsgator's online reader, there are plans to make them available in the desktop readers as well.

Additionally, according to a blog post on Venture Chronicles, the company has also been working with mSpoke to provide a categorization capability to their products that will soon offer Wikipedia-style indexing of content.

Newsgator Online, image courtesy of Jeff Nolan

Who Will Win?

With illumio's commitment to being a downloadable product only, Newsgator has the advantage, but even it still faces opposition from the still popular online reader provided by Bloglines as well as the increasingly-popular Google Reader.

Although users are demanding products that provide filtering, it's yet to be seen whether or not they will ditch their currently preferred online readers just to have access to these tools. If anything, Google Reader is one of the worst when it comes to filtering - in fact, its social feature that lets friends share stories means that you are likely to read the same story over and over again. Yet, it is growing in popularity despite its lack of filtering. (That is, unless you just read your friends' shares, which could be see as a type of human fitltering for your RSS.)

However, it is nice to see some forward movement in the recommendation and filtering space, even if it's not available in all readers yet. The fact that it's out there will mean other web apps and desktop readers will need to start offering similar technologies in order to stay competitive.

One of our favorite filtering services, AideRSS, is now ranking by popularity the individual items in feeds you subscribe to. Newsgator users can now read the most commented on, linked-to, Dugg and saved in del.icio.us posts in either a single feed or across the bulk of their subscriptions.

Newsgator Online has long been slower, uglier and more awkward to use than the company's other consumer products like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon. It's been much improved lately in all those matters and now offers personalized feed recommendations. Newsgator also publishes an APML file for each user's activity, though it's export only so far.

Limitations

The AideRSS processing is limited at launch to the 1000 most subscribed-to blogs in Newsgator. That means this is good for casual use, but one of the biggest benefits of AideRSS is its ability to process any RSS feed. I regularly use it to filter obscure blogs or blogsearch feeds, for example. You can imagine the processing power that would require though. Starting with the 1000 most popular feeds sounds like a great solution to me.

Right now it's only Newsgator Online where this integration is available - not, for example in NetNewsWire. Since the company's desktop products sync with its online and mobile readers - it would be great if users could read at home on the desktop readers (which are some of the best products on the market) and then read just AideRSS filtered highlights on the road by mobile.

We'll see where this goes, but for now I would recommend exporting your feeds out of whatever reader you currently use, importing them into a Newsgator Online account and giving the AideRSS view a try. It's pretty handy and OPML makes it very easy to try out.

If you're interested in RSS filtering for popularity, check out RSSMeme's new FriendFeed filter, too. It looks pretty hot.

See the screenshot below, articles truncated here but full feed display is also available. AideRSS ranking is displayed in the bottom right of each item.

The new program, Inbox 3.0, offers several new features including enhanced relevancy, attention reporting, easy subscription adding, flag synchronization and a redesigned UI.

You may remember back in January, NewsGator began giving away many of their products for free, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and others available here. What you may not have realised is why.

As it turns out, the power of their newly expanded community is being utilized to form the backbone of the company's relevance engine. When you flag an item, email a clipping, save a clipping, etc., this anonymous usage data is sent back to NewsGator. (This was fully disclosed by the company and can be turned off, if desired. Read more in the FAQ).

By combining this "relevance metadata," NewsGator can provide their users, like those using Inbox 3.0, with the most relevant news and information while also keeping track of what subscriptions you care most about and allowing you to export this information in APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) so it can be shared with other services.

If you go to "My Reading Habits," from the toolbar, you have the option to export as either APML or OPML. The APML option sorts your feeding by attention - that is by how much you interact with the feed. This APML file can then be imported into other programs.

Exporting Attention Data

NewsGator's Nick Bradbury is a big proponent of APML, having joined the APML Workgroup back in October. Unfortunately, though, although the program exports APML, there is no import APML feature, nor was there a way to import the APML to my other NewsGator program, FeedDemon. However, according to an older post on Bradbury's blog, import is supposed to be the next step they focus on, so we hope to see import support soon.

In addition to the attention and relevancy improvements, the new version of Inbox 3.0 offers a new UI which is designed to fit in more with Outlook 2007's look and feel, and easy subscription adding. Also, the flag synchronization feature syncs flagged items between different computers running Outlook but also between NewsGator's Mac and PC RSS readers – NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

For many office workers, a good part of the day is spent in Outlook, so Inbox 3.0 will be a nice find for them, especially because the program, like the desktop readers, is free.

As we reported in October, NewsGator joined the APML Workgroup. APML, the Attention Profiling Markup Language, is an attention data spec that "allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers." Attention data is not the most easy concept to grasp, but to quote Marshall Kirkpatrick from an earlier article on ReadWriteWeb, the simple explanation is that, "Attention Data consists of all the information online about what you read, write, share and consume." (For more on why you'd want to collect that data, see Alex Iskold's overviews of attention data.)

NewsGator is clearly serious about collecting attention data and using it to enhance the news reading experience. Reinacker said today that rather than just integrate APML into their feed readers, NewsGator plans to "implement an endpoint in our online platform where you (and only you!) can always access your personal APML data." The data will be aggregated from your usage across the entire NewsGator product universe.

The company hopes that by going free, they will attract more users to their reader (I am a recent convert, myself), which in turn will give them a greater pool from which to gather attention data and build stronger tools that rely on that data. But a poll we ran about a year ago revealed that 55% of ReadWriteWeb readers use web-based RSS readers (71% if you included personal start pages and portals). Just 18% still used dedicated offline RSS readers.

With today's news, we've decided to run that poll again. How much of an uphill climb does NewsGator have now to gain marketshare for their desktop readers? Will free desktop readers perhaps help win back some old users who have defected to online readers? Please share your thoughts in the comments below and participate in the poll.