As you can see, the large majority of our users (around 80%) are either not interested, or would ask for it to be free. This is understandable, given that the majority of our users themselves are using the Freemium version of BlogBridge. This is always as we intended it: BlogBridge is aimed at people with a major info glut problem, and those folks are not the majority. Those folks are happy paying users.

However, this does pose a conundrum for us, the maintainers of BlogBridge. After all you can imagine that developing BlogBridge has not been free, and while we constantly support and add features to the product, we too have to put food on the table and have a roof over our heads.

So we regret to have to say, that at least for the moment, we are suspending work on the BlogBridge iPhone application until we find a way to fund further development. We aren’t talking about that much funding, really, around $5,000 would do it.

We will be trying to get that funding elsewhere; another possibility is that a qualified iPhone open source developer gets in touch with us; we would be willing to put the new code for BlogBridge for iPhone under an open source license, just like BlogBridge itself is today. Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions!

If you are not familiar with BlogBridge, check this out.

The Virology Blog, “About Viruses and Viral Disease”, sounds a bit of a downer doesn’t it? But it is well written and informative and quite relevant today. I recommend it.

Note: If you are using BlogBridge then you can simply right click on the link above and choose “Subscribe to This Feed” and you will subscribe to that feed. One click! Cool eh?

I have, for several months now, seen a string of posts and tweets from these same lefty friends that are either mocking or dismissive of the Conservatives nascent efforts on Twitter. Here’s one example courtesy of TechPresident’s own Micah Sifry.

“It’s positively quaint to listen to Republicans murmur optimistically about their “dominance” on Twitter. #polc09, #tcot, #p2″

The very first time I saw a comment like that, it reminded me immediately of comments I had seen and heard before. They were the openly dismissive comments directed by complacent and cocky Republicans at the Democrats efforts online. Average: 0 Your rating: None (from: Why Twitter Matters & The Left Should Be Nervous)

I continue to follow interesting blog posts about whether Twitter ‘matters‘ or not. What do you think? And how useful is the Twitter support (both posting and following) on BlogBridge for you?

“[...]But RSS started to bring me down. You know that sinking feeling you get when you open your e-mail and discover hundreds of messages you need to respond to—that realization that e-mail has become another merciless chore in your day?[...]” (from Slate Magazine)

Of course we here at BlogBridge strenuously disagree

• If you need to read hundreds of blogs, say as part of your job, then there’s no other choice than using a powerful reader like BlogBridge
• Also, don’t think as blog reading like email reading. There’s no reason to read every single post in blogs you care about! You can skim, you can use SmartFeeds to identify posts that talk about what you care about and just read those, you can rate and rank your feeds.
• Remember also that RSS readers nowadays are much more than RSS readers. BlogBridge especially sits as kind of your high productivity cockpit in the middle of the avalanche of content, blogs, news, tweets, tags, and so on and so forth, and also allows you to be very efficient about contributing and responding back over each of those channels.

So yes, if you read 5 or 10 feeds then an RSS Reader is mostly a pain, but if you are required to keep up with hundreds and even thousands of feeds, then something like BlogBridge is priceless!

I confess: I am a Twitter quitter. Despite the meteoric rise of this micro-blogging site among news organizations, celebrities, and politicians, I found it remarkably easy to stop using it. At first I felt guilty. I read newspapers online. I’m on Facebook. I text (albeit not with those insipid abbrevi8shnz). Twitter should have come naturally to me. It didn’t.

For us, given that our revenue model (ahem, such as it is) relies on hard-core users to be willing to pay a tiny bit for server sync, this is a more difficult proposition. I wonder, if we offered this feature, would folks expect it to be part of the ‘free’ BlogBridge, or be willing to pay for a basic ($5/3 months) subscription for the capability?Here’s a quote from this LifeHacker article:

The Big Showdown between Google Reader’s web-based convenience and FeedDemon’s speedy, customizable client may become moot. The latest FeedDemon beta now supports synchronizing with Google Reader, giving RSS addicts the best of both worlds. (from LifeHacker)

So, tell us, what do you think?

“Pito said that the latest release, BlogBridge 6.6, comes with Twitter support. This makes a lot of sense as Twitter is often used to share blog links. After all, what can you do in 140 characters? Now I like Twitter but see it primarily as a way to point to things.  I find interesting stuff through Twitter. A RRS reader is another way to discovery stuff that you can then share through twitter.” (from The App Gap)

In doing this I am struck by the variety (many similar but still different) ways to access information that is being served up as part of a ‘web services API’ or a ‘REST API’. This has inspired me to see some parallels between the current scene and what led to the original invention of RSS, a format/protocol that we here at BlogBridge have spent many years working with.

You may be interested in this paper. (By the way, as an experiment I am publishing it on the Scripd site to see if that helps or hinders things. You may be interested in the site yourself.

Data Rss