Author: Nick Bradbury

Amit Agarwal has the scoop: I’ve been experimenting with making FeedDemon sync with Google Reader.  It’s something we get a lot of requests for, so we decided to see what it would entail to add Google Reader synching to both FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.

I should make it clear that it’s not 100% definite that this feature will see the light of day – it’s still in the experimental stage.  I sort of have an unwritten policy of not promising a feature until I’ve already coded it, and there’s a lot of coding left to do here :)

But assuming that Google Reading synching is added, I’m curious to know what specifically you would like to see.  Beyond the basics of synching (i.e.: ensuring that changes you make in Google Reader are reflected in FeedDemon, and vice versa), what could I do to make the integration more useful?

One thing I’ve added already is sharing – just click FeedDemon’s  “Share” icon to add an article to your Google Reader “Shared Items” page.  But I’m guessing there are some other features in Google Reader that I’m not aware of which could be really nice to take advantage of.

Like many of you, I’m addicted to reading Twitter.  And not surprisingly, I’m also addicted to reading feeds.  So you’d think I’d love reading my Twitter feeds in FeedDemon, right?

Unfortunately, no.  The problem is that Twitter feeds are plain text – no hyperlinks, no images, no nothing.  As a result, reading Twitter feeds is a bland experience in any feed reader.  For example, here’s how an item in a Twitter feed looks in FeedDemon 2.x:

That’s a boring way to view a Twitter stream, so I’ve spruced things up in FeedDemon 3.0:

As you can see, there are a number of improvements.  First, URLs are automatically hyperlinked and benefit from the short URL preview feature I mentioned last week.  Author names and @replies are automatically hyperlinked as well so you can click to view that person’s Twitter stream.  I’ve also added hyperlinking of #hashtags – just click to go to a Twitter search page which shows all tweets with that same hashtag.  And since Twitter isn’t meant to be a read-only service, I’ve added a “Reply” icon to enable replying to a specific tweet.

Last but not least, I’ve also added profile pictures.  Unfortunately, you’ll only see them if the feed is in a folder that isn’t synchronized, and then only when you’re subscribed to the Atom version of the feed (they’re not included in the RSS version).  Hopefully the Twitter folks will make it possible to determine a user’s profile image from their username, since that would enable always showing the profile image.

URL shorteners such as TinyURL perform a handy service: give them a long URL, and they return a shorter URL that’s less likely to break in emails.  Twitter users in particular benefit from URL shorteners because they enable shrinking a URL that would otherwise exceed Twitter’s 140-character limit.

There is, however, a downside.  When you’re faced with a short URL, you have no idea where it really goes.  Does it redirect to a useful site, or does it go to a phishing page?  For all you know, the link could point to a porn site that pops up the kind of images that your boss wouldn’t think too highly of.

In my case, I use FeedDemon as my primary web browser, and I was tired of looking at my Twitter page and not knowing where all those TinyURLs would take me.  So I decided to address this problem.

Starting with the next build of FeedDemon 2.8, mousing over a short URL will show a balloon tip which contains the long URL – so you’ll know where the link takes you before you click it.  Here’s how it looks:

So far, I’ve added support for the following URL shortening services:

• TinyURL
• bit.ly
• is.gd
• Snurl / Snipr / SnipURL
• twurl.cc / twurl.nl
• URL.ie
• traceurl

If you know of any popular URL shortening services that I’m missing, let me know by posting a comment here.  As long as the service returns the long URL in the location header after doing a HEAD request, I should be able to support it in FeedDemon.

Update: Since originally blogging this post, I’ve added support for these services:

• 0rz.tw
• Cligs
• ff.im
• hex.io
• idek.net 
• ppt.cc
• kuso.cc
• rubyurl.com
• tr.im
• xrl.us

On second thought, that headline might not be entirely correct :)

As you can imagine, the comments to my last post have spawned a lot of conversations at NewsGator.  I really don’t want to say yet what we’re going to do as a result (because we’re not sure yet), but please don’t think my lack of response is due to anything other than not wanting to open my mouth too soon.

Funny thing is, I actually do understand some of the negative reaction to ads (for proof, take a look at this cartoon I drew many years ago).  I personally don’t find the ads in FeedDemon to be bothersome, but I do recognize that advertising has entered every corner of our lives, and sometimes it seems there’s no escaping it no matter how hard we try.  For many of you, it’s not about how tasteful or targeted the ads are: it’s about not wanting to be sold to every minute of your lives.  I get that.

The problem for us is that we find ourselves in an ugly economic climate that absolutely requires everyone to earn revenue wherever they can.  Charging for our software again didn’t seem wise (imagine the reaction to that!), which led us to consider advertising as a possible revenue stream.  I won’t claim to have been in love with the idea, but after considering the alternatives, and especially once I saw how the ads would look in FeedDemon, I felt better about it.  Anyway, if you want a bit more detail on our thinking behind the ad-based version, check out this post on Jeff Nolan’s blog.

So…what I would like to know next is how you recommend we earn revenue from our software.  Let’s just assume we offer an ad-free version for a small fee: would that alone be enough to pay the bills?  I have serious doubts about that (that doesn’t mean we won’t do it, but it does mean we have to consider other approaches, too).

Look, I love the fact that there are still people who buy software – even just to get rid of the ads – but the ugly truth for developers is that these people are in the extreme minority.  Today’s audience has been conditioned to expect software for free, and plenty of otherwise honest people have no qualms about piracy.  Within days of releasing a paid ad-free version, it would be available on hundreds of warez sites and IRC channels.

Really, that’s a huge reason why we considered ads in the first place.  Very few people are willing to pay for software anymore, so we had to look at other sources of revenue.  Which is why I want to hear from you about anything we might be overlooking.  If charging for software doesn’t work, and advertising in software bothers so many people, then what else can we do?

It’s been almost a year since we made FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and NewsGator Inbox free, and it has been very gratifying to gain so many new customers.  But as you can imagine, we continue to look for ways to generate revenue from our software.

One of the ideas, of course, was to include advertising in our applications, but that idea never sit well with us.  As I’ve written before, I’ve seen too many cases where advertising led to compromising customers’ privacy, and that wasn’t a path any of us wanted to ever go down.  And besides, so much advertising on the web is irrelevant, tacky and often just plain obnoxious.  No developer wants to work at building a great user interface only to see it marred by animated Viagra ads.

At some point, Brent Simmons mentioned an ad network called The Deck, and it was different than most other networks we’ve looked at.  The Deck is focused on ads for creative web professionals, and they’re picky about the ads they accept.  Just as important, the ads can be embedded in our applications without sharing any customer data.

I’ve been running a test version of FeedDemon which features ads from The Deck, and I have to say, I like what I see.  Every single ad is tastefully done, and since they’re static images, there’s no flashy animation trying to get your attention.  I even found myself clicking on several of them to find out more, which is something I very rarely do.

The screenshot below shows how it looks (click to enlarge):

As you can see, the ads are displayed at the bottom left of FeedDemon’s user interface – they’re not inserted into the feeds you’re subscribed to, nor will they jump around the page you’re reading.

Long story short, we’re going to give this a shot, and we want to know what you think about it.  It’s important to us that we generate revenue from our software, but we absolutely don’t want to do it in a way that offends or distracts our customers.

If you’re interested in taking a look, stop by the FeedDemon 2.8 Beta site to download a test version which has the ads enabled.