One question that caught my eye - Shawn asked him what an average day looks like, and this was Daniel’s response:

That said, I’m still pretty disorganized in this regard, so in all honesty, a typical day for me is to wake up and immediately start working. The hours then surrender to tackling bug fixes, implementing features, responding to customer support inquiries, and trying to squeeze in some socializing via chat and Twitter.

Left to my own devices I will work all day and into the night, so I’ve developed some tricks to get myself away from the computer. Forcing myself to take a shower, make lunch, go to the gym, etc., are good ways of punctuating the work with other activities. This is something I hope to write more about in my blog, because as I said, it fascinates me.

It’s funny to read this…when NewsGator was just me, and I was still running it all in my house, this was exactly my situation. I found I had to have a “routine” - I would shower in the morning by 11am at the latest, and I would nearly always go have lunch with friends (or at very least get out of the house and eat). Otherwise, I would find myself getting hungry about 3pm, have a quick snack, and the next thing I would know it would be midnight and I’d be hungry again, wondering where the day went.

And there’s an advantage to all those lunches - many of the folks I ate with gave me some free consulting over burritos, and now work at NewsGator. :-)

So then I get the crazy idea to just unplug the router’s power, and then plug it back in. I mean, if all else fails, power cycle, right? Well lo and behold, it started working…who would have thunk? So then I’m playing with Back to my Mac, and it’s all looking good. For a while.

Then my router started getting flaky. Like, every few minutes it would stop responding in the admin interface, and connections to the internet would be stopped. The only way to fix it was to either wait a few minutes for it to come back, or power cycle it. Clearly this was not going to be ok.

So I went down to the Apple store (about 5 minutes away), and bought the last 500GB Time Capsule they had in stock. I was thinking about doing this anyway, since I wanted 802.11n in the house, but a dead router was a great excuse to do it sooner rather than later. Got the Time Capsule home, plugged it in, everything worked as expected. Actually, not everything worked right away - I had to power cycle my cable modem to get things talking to each other - but after that everything was great. And Back to My Mac is working fine.

On the storage side of things, I switched my Time Machine backups to use the drive in the Time Capsule; again, everything worked as expected. I’m seeing about 10MB/sec doing backups over a gigabit ethernet network - not stellar, but it’s fast enough for what I’m using it for. And it’s working about 5x faster than Glenn Fleishman is seeing in his Macworld first look, for some reason. I won’t complain about mine. :-)

It certainly “feels” fast - but I wanted to actually make some measurements, to see if it was just my imagination. I could run benchmarks, but that didn’t sound like much fun. So instead, I ran a process in Adobe Lightroom 1.3.1 to create 1:1 previews for 211 raw images (compressed NEF format from a Nikon D200), which is roughly 1.75 GB of files.

Here’s what I did. And yes, I’m apparently geeky enough that this sounded like fun. :-)

On the Mac Pro and the Macbook Pro, I generated these 1:1 previews in an existing Lightroom catalog with about 12,000 images in it. On all other systems, I generated the previews in a brand new catalog with nothing in it other than these 211 photos.

All of the virtual machines mentioned below are using VMWare Fusion, running on the Mac Pro.

Here are the configurations I ran, and the results:

Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8 GHz Xeon, 8 cores, 12GB RAM, OS X 10.5.2
CPU utilization between 350-400% throughout
Total time 5:36, average 1.59 sec/image

Macbook Pro, 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 cores, 4GB RAM, OS X 10.5.2
CPU utilization between 150-200%
Total time 13:35, average 3.86 sec/image

Dell XPS 420, 2.8 GHz Pentium D, 2 cores*, 3GB RAM, Windows XP SP2
CPU utilization about 50%
Total time 27:00, average 7.68 sec/image

Virtual machine, 2 processors, 3GB RAM, Windows XP SP2
CPU utilization between 150-200%
Total time 8:58, average 2.55 sec/image

Virtual machine, 1 processor, 3GB RAM, Windows XP SP2
CPU utilization about 100%
Total time 15:12, average 4.32 sec/image

Virtual machine, 2 processors, 3GB RAM, Windows Vista
CPU utilization between 150-200%
Total time 8:29, average 2.41 sec/image

* - not sure why this process on the Pentium D only seemed to be using a single processing core, that’s what happened when it ran.

Clearly the Mac Pro is pretty darn fast, and Lightroom interestingly appears to use up to 4 processing cores. The VM data was interesting to see, as well; I can run Windows XP in a VM dramatically faster than running it on my (admittedly old) Dell XPS 400. I wish I had a Core 2 Duo windows machine handy that I could try this on - would be interesting to compare that data with the virtualized Xeon processors on the Mac Pro.

Just over a year ago, I spent a week on a small island near St. Thomas, doing a series of photo shoots. One of the models was Amy Davis. I remember thinking wow, beautiful and talented model…but then I heard her sing - and omigosh, I was at a loss for words. :-)

Anyway, Amy’s a sweetheart…and I’ve got literally hundreds of photos of her. So in the interest of helping her win, I’m going to post one previously unpublished photo here every week she stays in the competition. Vote for her, and you get another photo. :-)

Here’s the first one of Amy, wearing a NewsGator shirt, of course using NewsGator Go! on her Treo (this was shot as part of a shoot for a potential ad campaign which we never ran):

There are a couple more shots (swimwear, fashion) of her in my photography portfolio - go take a look if you’d like!

One of the more common questions/complaints we get is something about a feed not appearing to update in a timely manner. 99% of the time, it’s actually a problem with the feed - but I’ll come back to that.

There are about 2.5 million feeds in our system, and these feeds get divided into categories. They have fancy (and sometimes amusing) internal names, but for now I will describe them as follows. Also keep in mind these rules are subject to change, and in fact do change quite often to better optimize the experience for our users and our overall system load.

And before I get into all of this…note that feeds that ping our system will be updated and available typically within 60 seconds. The category the feed is in is largely irrelevant.

Category A: these are feeds that are needed by certain commercial syndication services customers with extremely tight SLAs - some of these SLAs guarantee content available within 2 minutes of publication in a feed. Feeds in this category are retrieved every 60 seconds. Exception - if a feed reliably pings our system with updates, the poll-retrieval interval may be dropped to a lower category; however, if the feed does not appear to ping us with every update, the 60 second interval remains in effect.

Category B: these are feeds with over 20 subscribers, or occasional feeds that for whatever reason are deemed “important” enough to keep in this category. Retrieval interval is 15 minutes.

Category C: these are feeds with 2-19 subscribers, and any feed that requires credentials to access. These feeds are retrieved every 1-2 hours depending on system load.

Category D: these are feeds with only 1 subscriber, which do not require credentials. If that subscriber is an “active user”, interval is 1-2 hours. If that subscriber is not very active, interval is 4-8 hours depending on load. The definition of “active” changes, but think of it as people who use the system daily-ish.

Category E: this is what we affectionately call the “penalty box.” These are feeds which have returned some kind of error, and they are “penalized” for it. For example - if a feed 404’s, it is immediately penalized for 24 hours. A 500 server error? 4 hours. Other kinds of errors (including parsing problems) cause penalties of varying lengths, taking into account how many consecutive errors we see. If a feed continues to have errors for 90 days, it will be blacklisted and no longer retrieved at all…and the only way for a feed to get off the blacklist is for it to a) fix the error(s) and then b) ping us. [I should add that 410 (gone) is not considered an error; feeds that return a 410 are immediately removed and all subscribers are unsubscribed.]

Category F: this is somewhat of a grab bag of other cases. The most visible type of feed in this category is craigslist feeds - we retrieve them on a 48-hour interval. This sucks - for you, for me, for everyone - but the problem is craigslist will throttle and blacklist us, and they seem not to be interested in solving this problem with us (we’re also not the only ones with this problem). So 48 hours is roughly the minimum interval we can get away with and minimize the chances of getting blacklisted (which takes days to undo).

By far the best way to help ensure timely updates to content is to encourage publishers to ping our system when they update (I talk about NewsGator’s ping endpoint here). A large number already do this - but there are some folks who do not. If they’re using FeedBurner, we’re already getting pinged; if they’re using another system, they may need to add NewsGator to their ping list manually. But typically, after a ping, updated content is available within 60 seconds. And as mentioned, a ping can even remove content from our blacklist.

We get a fair number of inquiries in the forums and elsewhere about feeds not updating; in nearly all of those instances, everything is actually working fine - the feed has usually fallen into category E for whatever reason. Something I’ve been thinking about is some kind of status page or something where someone can type in the name of a feed, and we’ll display status for that feed (including why it’s in the penalty box if it is)…we’ve resisted doing this because it’s just one of those things our users shouldn’t have to worry about.

We used to have 4 T1’s ganged together somehow in our office, giving us around 6 Mb/sec. Shared by 75 people, and responsible for not only internet but also telephone traffic, you can imagine it wasn’t exactly fast.

At home I have a Comcast cable modem, and I get something like 8 Mb/sec, which until today I thought was pretty fast.

But this morning, when I got to the office, our IT folks had completed our office network cutover to a 100 Mb/sec fiber connection to the internet…and oh. my. gosh. I downloaded a 20MB file just for fun, and it was done by the time I could look at my watch to find the second hand and figure out how long it took. Download progress meters aren’t any fun any more, as they go from 0 to 100% with hardly any stops in between…

I was chatting with one of said IT guys about it, as they’ve been using the new connection for a few days before they cut over the whole office…he said it takes something like 15 or 20 minutes to download a DVD from MSDN subscriber downloads, and he said “it’s almost easier than looking through the case to find the physical DVD.” Lol!

Be aware I have no idea how to actually do a cold call. There is likely no one in the world worse at that than me. So everything I write here is from the perspective of the callee, not the caller. I’m sure this will read like “10 steps to fewer sales” for experienced sales folks. :-)

Imagine this, which seems to happen most of the time:

Greg: “Hello, this is Greg…”

Sales guy Bob: “Hello, Greg, this is Bob WannaSellYa. How are you doing today?”

11 words, and this already puts me in a bad spot, and instantly annoys me. First, I have no idea who Bob WannaSellYa is or what company he’s with. So I’m either annoyed that he wants to know how I’m doing even though I don’t know him, or I’m horrified that I might have met him yesterday and forgot his name. Could go either way. If you have some connection to me - if say someone I know gave you my contact info - then say so right away, and I’ll pay much more attention. Otherwise, my usual response to this:

Greg: “Fine.”

And I’m sorry to admit, it’s not a polite “fine” - it’s more of an annoyed, who-the-f%@!-are-you “fine”.

I don’t want to be mean, I really don’t. It’s not my nature. But I have a lot to do today, and talking to you wasn’t on my list. So please, do what you can to get to the point quickly.

Ok, so now Bob knows I’m doing fine, and if he’s really listening, he knows I’m already somewhat annoyed about the call. Now comes the meat of the conversation, I guess. I’ll give a hint at this point - if I don’t know who you are, then don’t pile on any more small talk; asking me about the weather in Denver will not help your chances. But assuming we’re past that:

Bob: “Great, glad to hear it. Greg, I’m with AcmeServices here in Dallas, TX, and we’ve got 90 of the Fortune 100 as clients. Do you currently host your own information systems?”

Greg: “I’m sorry, who did you say you were with?”

Bob: “AcmeServices.”

Greg: “And what do you do?”

You see, I’ve probably never heard of AcmeServices, I don’t know what you do, and I’m not likely to have a conversation with you about what I might or might not be hosting until I know what you’re after. Are you a managed service provider? An edge network provider? A consultant? A hosting company? Give me one or two sentences about what exactly you do, and maybe even how you think it might fit with what I do. Even if you get the second part wrong, I’ll know two things:

1. I’ll have a general idea what you do.

2. I’ll know that you spent at least 5 minutes looking at what I do, so I don’t have to explain that we sell enterprise software AND operate an online hosted system.

Based on #1, I’ll be able to triage the call. Either tell you a) I’m not interested, b) I’m not the one to talk to but perhaps point you to someone else, or c) I’m indeed the guy and let’s spend a few minutes talking. And if you also did #2, we’ll be able to jump right in if there’s something here.

And if I know enough about what you’re saying to tell you I’m not interested, then you’re just not going to be able to talk me into it right then on the phone. It’s never happened. If I don’t really know, then I’ll say so and you can tell me more. If, for example, you sell solid-state storage, and I use regular disk storage, then I’ll pepper you with a bunch of questions to help me understand whether I might be interested…but if I’m not interested from the get-go, then you can save us both some time, and you can save me from feeling like I’m being rude by trying to end the call.

(aside: if you do sell solid-state storage, please do call me, because I do have some questions. :-)

Let me try to boil all this down to a few tips, if I might:

• Get to the point quickly; small talk is awkward when we don’t know each other.
• If we have some mutual acquaintance or connection, say so quickly, and I won’t blow you off. Better yet, ask them to introduce you to me via email.
• If I don’t answer your voice mail, you don’t need to leave 8 more messages - I got the first one. I probably just don’t need what you’re selling at the moment. It’s no offense.
• Don’t ever say we’ve chatted personally in the past when we haven’t. I have a bad memory, but I remember things like this. This is a sure-fire way to make sure I will never return your voicemail or email. You’d be surprised how much this happens.
• Email is a much better way to get ahold of me, frankly, than the phone. If you’re obviously selling something, then I might not respond, but I do at least read the first sentence or two of every email I get. If I don’t need something now, but think I might in the future, I’ll save your email, and remember you later (I usually don’t reply until I’m ready to actually dig in). But - if your email reads like spam, as opposed to a personal note, it’s much less likely that I’ll save it or respond.

Anyway, I’m sure I just offended most of the sales people who read my blog, and perhaps others as well…and like I said, I have no idea what kinds of things actually work and what doesn’t. I just know what I personally respond to. So if you want to sell me stuff, this will probably help!

When FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, or NewsGator Inbox are running in stand-alone mode, that is with sync NOT enabled, they will retrieve feeds directly from the source using their own user-agent. When you look in your Feedburner (or other) stats, you’ll see these show up as NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, etc.

When NewsGator Online retrieves your feed, it reports total subscriber count as part of the user-agent. It’s retrieving your feed once on behalf of lots of users.

Now here’s the part that causes confusion. When FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, or NewsGator Inbox ARE in sync mode (which is the default mode unless turned off), they will retrieve the content from NewsGator Online’s feed store; they will NOT retrieve content from the source. When you look at your Feedburner stats (or whatever you’re using to determine RSS reader distribution), these subscribers will be reported as NewsGator Online users.

Related to this, you will never see NewsGator Go! in your stats - this is because Go! only works in sync mode, and always retrieves content through NewsGator Online…and thus subscriber counts are reported as part of the online counts.

If a single user uses (say) FeedDemon, Inbox, Go!, and NewsGator Online all synced together, they’ll be reported to you as a single subscriber - not as 4 subscribers.

Folks have asked us if we could split out the statistics, to more “accurately” report statistics for the individual client applications. This is actually harder than it sounds, due to the seamless nature of our sync platform. Our system knows if a user is using, say, NetNewsWire and Go! both; however, it’s usually unknown which of those applications a user is going to use to read a specific piece of content in advance. We could report one user for both apps, but this would overstate our subscriber counts. So essentially we compromise, and report them all as NewsGator Online - which is sometimes confusing, but accurately counts users, rather than applications.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Picasa Web Albums, discussing their terms of service and explaining why I couldn’t use it. Basically, those terms said that Google could help themselves to your photos if they wish, and if they wanted to put them on a Google billboard in Times Square, that would be just fine with you, thanks.

Well, Facebook is also helping themselves to your content. From their terms of use:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

This is just nuts. Basically, they’re welcome to take your stuff, make a copy, and use it for a multi-million dollar ad campaign if they want. Or, they could license YOUR photo to someone else to do the same.

Unbelievable.

If you’re thinking “hey, I don’t care” - read the part about you having the right to grant this license to Facebook. It’s possible you don’t - read my previous post about Picasa for details.

So other than my profile pic, which I suppose they can use for whatever they like, I’ve removed all of my photos from my Facebook profile. My profile is now pretty bare - not a lot of exciting stuff there. I’ll just point people to other places where I actually share some of the things I’ve done without worrying about some company helping themselves to whatever rights they want.

Facebook, you convince your partners to help you help yourself to my private information. You blatantly help yourself to whatever rights you want to everything I put on your site. What’s next? I shudder to imagine.

[via CBC News]

First, we’ve got new releases of our most popular applications: FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 (beta), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. Each of these is a pretty major release on its own - tons of new features in all of them.

But second, every one of those applications is now free! Free as in beer, that is. And add to the free list NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry as well. And not only are they free, but our online services (including synchronization) are now free as well! Not to mention our iPhone reader, HTML mobile reader, and all of the other applications that are part of our online platform.

I haven’t been this excited about our consumer products and strategy since we bought FeedDemon and NetNewsWire a couple of years ago.

But I can hear you asking already…”why, Greg, why would you do such a thing?”

What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients. Anyone who wants a rich experience for consuming content, or anyone who uses multiple computers or devices and wants a best-of-breed experience on each can now use our clients. Using a Mac at home, along with an iPhone? NetNewsWire and our iPhone reader will sync up. Have a PC at the office? FeedDemon will sync with your other two applications. And they’ll all sync with NewsGator Online. It all just works.

There are two reasons we want our clients to become ubiquitous. Well, three if you count “we want to be nice.” But two other reasons. :-)

First, we’ve found that when we go into an enterprise to sell NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) and Social Sites, there are already a ton of people using one of our desktop apps already. The more folks are already using them, the easier it is to sell our server products - especially since these client apps can sync with NGES directly. So, the more the merrier - we’re going to make sure that everyone who wants to use our apps can do so, without having to climb over the hump of having to dig out their credit card.

And second, we want to collect “attention” data (actually I like to call this activity data, but everyone else in the world calls it attention) and use it to make everyone’s experience better. If there is a specific feed you love, and you’re constantly emailing its articles to friends or saving articles in your clippings, that’s interesting…and if there are a lot of people doing this, it’s probably a good indicator about the “relevancy” of that content for other users. Similar with individual articles that are getting a lot of attention from users. Basically, by using your data, in combination with aggregate data from other users, we can deliver a better experience for everyone. And that’s a good thing - both for us and for you.

We’ve taken some small steps along these lines so far in the client applications - watch over the next few months as these capabilities really start to come into their own, and roll out both in the online reader and continue to evolve in the clients.

We’ve talked about APML in the past, and said we’d implement APML export in the clients. We’re going to take that a step further - and implement an endpoint in our online platform where you (and only you!) can always access your personal APML data. That data will be a rollup of all of your activity across all of our clients that you use. We’re also going to make aggregate data available via API. You should start to see all of this start rolling out within the next couple of months.

So anyway - this is great news! I’m personally really excited about this, and I’m looking forward to hearing from you. There are a lot of details I didn’t cover here…so here are a couple of links with more info.

Press release

Q&A - details as to upgrades, refunds, etc.