Sometimes I post things without having all the data (although I didn’t know it at the time of posting). What’s interesting about shooting off your mouth in public is that your readers can say “hey, you forgot about this.”
Today is one of those times.
Last night the CEO of Attensa, Craig Barnes wrote me and asked me to give Attensa a fair shot in the RSS world. Today he wrote the same thing on his blog.
I owe him an apology and a correction. Here it is: I’m sorry Craig for not knowing what Attensa had announced. I’m downloading Attensa now to see how it compares to other RSS aggregators. One thing I noticed is that he doesn’t have as many clients out there as NewsGator does. Craig says they are working feverishly on that.
Craig says that their backend is more reliable than NewsGator’s. I’m looking forward to testing that. I’ve had problems using NewsGator on my cell phone, for instance (sometimes it’s hard to mark a feed as read) and sometimes feeds I’ve marked as read come back down as unread. Other people have been reporting other problems with NewsGator’s feeds (Shel Israel told me yesterday that it once resubscribed to feeds he had unsubscribed from).
Let the best API win! Thanks to Craig for correcting my ignorance.
Scobleizer 
Thanks Roibert for taking the time to listen, we look forward to sharing more about our technology and our strategy going forward. That said, no apology is necessary, I didn’t think you were a mind reader – you had now way of knowing about the existence of, or depth of, our API. We are looking to embrace and enhance all RSS APIs from the big three, NG, and more… Anyway, Thanks for noting! CB
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Thanks Roibert for taking the time to listen, we look forward to sharing more about our technology and our strategy going forward. That said, no apology is necessary, I didn’t think you were a mind reader – you had now way of knowing about the existence of, or depth of, our API. We are looking to embrace and enhance all RSS APIs from the big three, NG, and more… Anyway, Thanks for noting! CB
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I’m a happy Attensa user.
Believe it or not, I’ve been late getting on the RSS bandwagon, and actually used to do all my RSS reading in Firefox (talk about cumbersome and slow.) Someone suggested I try using a dedicated RSS reader, so I looked around to see if there was anything that integrates with Outlook 2003.
And thus, Attensa.
I’d recommend it to anyone who asked. It’s outlook integration is great, and I hope it goes far, even with Outlook 12 on the horizon.
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I’m a happy Attensa user.
Believe it or not, I’ve been late getting on the RSS bandwagon, and actually used to do all my RSS reading in Firefox (talk about cumbersome and slow.) Someone suggested I try using a dedicated RSS reader, so I looked around to see if there was anything that integrates with Outlook 2003.
And thus, Attensa.
I’d recommend it to anyone who asked. It’s outlook integration is great, and I hope it goes far, even with Outlook 12 on the horizon.
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Slightly off-topic to the correction of posts, and that attensa has an api, but related to RSS aggregators and a missing feature…
One of things that I’ve noticed recently with almost all of the RSS agregators is that they are designed to only show text, hyperlinks and images… What about something a little more interactive?
I’ve been toying around with techniques for delivering interactive content over RSS (as far as I can tell the common RSS formats Atom/RSS 1.0/2.0 all support the inclusion of the extra HTML tags) but the aggregators remove them…
A couple of quick ideas where this kind of stuff could be used, asking your readers to fill in a survey (and submitting it from the aggregator rather than redirecting to a website, there are even businesses out there that gather customer data by sending out surveys, RSS could be a very easy distribution medium). Submit a comment directly from the reader (though there are issues with doing it that way), or how about sending out a trivia puzzle (fill in the answers and get a score back)
Of course RSS may not be the appropriate medium for delivering this content, but as a developer (and budding content builder) I find it frustrating that I can’t deliver the content I want to deliver..
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Slightly off-topic to the correction of posts, and that attensa has an api, but related to RSS aggregators and a missing feature…
One of things that I’ve noticed recently with almost all of the RSS agregators is that they are designed to only show text, hyperlinks and images… What about something a little more interactive?
I’ve been toying around with techniques for delivering interactive content over RSS (as far as I can tell the common RSS formats Atom/RSS 1.0/2.0 all support the inclusion of the extra HTML tags) but the aggregators remove them…
A couple of quick ideas where this kind of stuff could be used, asking your readers to fill in a survey (and submitting it from the aggregator rather than redirecting to a website, there are even businesses out there that gather customer data by sending out surveys, RSS could be a very easy distribution medium). Submit a comment directly from the reader (though there are issues with doing it that way), or how about sending out a trivia puzzle (fill in the answers and get a score back)
Of course RSS may not be the appropriate medium for delivering this content, but as a developer (and budding content builder) I find it frustrating that I can’t deliver the content I want to deliver..
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