Lab notes

… to a new site.

And so is the RSS feed, so you might want to switch here.

Background story. I started this blog to cover the development of Opsop, a new community site that’s all about listing stuff, finding it later, and sharing it with others. I’ve been learning a lot along the way, and decided it’s worth sharing with others. So this blog is mostly about collecting this information, and anything else I find interesting and engaging.

Now that Opsop is up and running, I’m switching over to the new blog. Same schedule, same content, with an even better way to contribute to the community.

You heard it here first! The artisans in the Yahoo Search atelier have been toiling away on a great new Yahoo Search product, My Web 2.0, and it is going into limited beta today. It’s the long rumored and greatly anticipated Social Search: better search through people you trust! And it has all the ingredients for a healthy Web 2.0 experience, including:

• Control what you see (and want to see) by your social network
• Open APIs for developers to mess with
• RSS feeds for pulling out the stuff you’re interested in

And of course:

• You can tag more than a kid with ADD on a third grade playground (including location, time and people tagging)

Quote, courtesy of the Flickr blog.

Going on a weekend trip tomorrow, so I’ll probably have to wait until Friday to get the details, and you bet I’m curious to know what this one is all about.

Microsoft is planning to extend the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) standard to better support the publishing of ordered lists of information, a company spokesman said Thursday. … “RSS is good for delivering what’s new, but not so good for things that are getting sorted or reordered,” Schare said.

Link

The news is out that NewsGator has acquired FeedDemon.

When I first got exposed to RSS I was mildly curious about this new technology, and played around with a few subscriptions, and a bunch of news readers. Then I found FeedDemon. I was hooked. Not only was FeedDemon a top rate application, it actually changed the way I consumed information. Ok, RSS did have something to do with it, but what really set the ball in motion was the speed with which I could get the feeds, browse through them and focus on the important ones. I have more feeds than I can keep track of, barely enough time to read the top ones, and a great user experience to pull it through.

And then FeedDemon added searches. So I have feeds using keywords for all the feeds I don’t have time to browse.

And then FeedDemon added podcasting. Like any new technology, I tested out podcasting in the early days, but was too lazy to actually use it. When FeedDemon added iTunes synchronization, I turned into a regular listener, with never a dull moment on my daily commute.

So congratulations to Nick Bradbury and the NewsGator team. But wait, it gets even better. NewsGator will honor existing FeedDemon customers with 2 years of free service and upgrades. So now I also get to try NewsGator, and I heard a lot of promising things about their service. That’s what I call commitment to customers. Congratulations to all of us.