Eric Hayes, ehayes, -e

Catching Up...

Okay, I think 2 months between posts is long enough.  :-)

Quite a bit has gone on in those 2 months!!  Let me start with what has me back to the blog.  Is it because I now magically have an abundance of time?  NO!  It stems from a great chat I had with Tom Foremski last Wednesday night at the, now famed, crazy late night Syndicate dinner party!

I told him; “I am trying to blog…  but, it takes too long, and I have so much to do”. It seems I am expending way much effort on a post, worrying about it being something many people may read (and make me look stupid). Well, Tom, you are right…  As no one is reading it, who cares…  just post!

So, hello no one!  Let me spew (for my own memory, if nothing else) about what has been going on the last bit…

* You Subscribe: RSS 0.95 has released to public preview. – As rough as this public preview is, I am happy to say, we are getting a good number of downloads & it seems to be “doing the job”

* You Subscribe: RSS 0.96 beta is out to some of you. – I am very pleased with how the publishing experience is coming along.  I can’t wait to roll out the host of bug fixes and polish points to the rest of the users!

* You Subscribe Online is in beta & synchronization is working wonderfully. – I love giving the demo of reading an article on my Treo & watching Outlook respond by marking as read, or deleting an article. About half of the people I’ve shown this to have a shared reaction. They blink a few times, and then look at me, then say something like; “that is cool”, or “I could use that right now”.  Fear not!  It is coming soon!!

* Had a great chat with Dave Sifry and Steve Gillmor a few weeks back on the topic of Attention.xml.  Interviewed by Alex Williams of Corante, and published as a Podcast.

* Many good discussions at Syndicate last week (made it worth the crazy cost of a room in midtown NY). 

• Had a nice chat with Charlene Li of Forrester.  She was on a panel discussing the future of RSS.  It was nice to hear her (and Robert Scoble) talk about their RSS experience, and see how well that fits with our direction.
• Made Robert Scoble sit through me demoing Synchronization (Sorry about that Robert…  I get a bit intense when I talk about what we are working on).
• Got to chat with David Sifry of Technorati for a bit.  We need some serious conversation of Attention.XML as used for synchronization!!
• Had a nice couple chats with Doc Searls, Thanks for the audio of the session i missed!
• Had a nice, if short chat with Dave Panos of Pluck, and Greg Reinacker of Newsgator/Feeddemon (Yes Greg, we do include your blog/feed in our list of easy to subscribe to feeds in You Subscribe: RSS).  I’ll say here, what I said there…  We should work together, in the area of a shared user experience with Attention.XML!!
• Had a great dinner Wednesday night, where I think we basically closed NY…  Great group of people from Pheedo, Nooked, SiliconValleyWatcher, FreeRange, Rok Hrastnik, etc.

Well, i guess that is all for now.  I'll try to post again before July. -e

Podcast is very cool!

Okay, so a while back, i would look at Podcasting and think...  Interesting, but i don't get it.  It didn't seem to have a proper connection to RSS...  But...  that was then...

Recently, while working on our initial Podcast support for the 0.83 release of You Subscribe: RSS, I had an opportunity to spend some time, searching all around, finding Podcast feeds, subscribing to them, listen to them (wishing they were just on my iPod...), etc...  In the process, I kind of became hooked on it! So, now I can’t wait to get the next version of our Podcast support done and out to all of you You Subscribe: RSS users!!  What will it look like?  All I can offer right now is...  It will set Podcasting on edge, as the best, most seamless Podcast solution available! (This won't all come out in the next 2 weeks...  but will be rolled out over the next few releases, fear not!)

To that end… this is an open call to tell me, what are your favorite Podcasts & what do you wish you could do with them?!

Leave me a comment!!

-e

Usage Patterns

It has been quite an interesting week!  The cool thing about coming up for air & sharing with people what you’ve been up to is getting to chat with people in your space (now that they know you share a space).

Back in the early 90’s, when I was leading design and development on what would become the “in its time de facto standard” PIM (Personal Information Manager) for Macintosh (Now Up-to-Date & Contact), I had a chance to interact with quite a few different types of user in the PIM category.  What I quickly came to realize is that there are a number of types of user, and they all are certain their PIM should work exactly how they use it. Twelve years later I am back to watching & learning different “Usage Patterns” for a new PIM data type…  News!

That said, you can count on You Subscribe: RSS being capable of morphing itself seamlessly into different usage patterns!  As I get to bloging more about what’s happening behind the scenes for You Subscribe: RSS, some of the core design decisions that support this will become obvious.

We are already getting some great feedback!  This is exactly what I was hoping for when I said; “Let’s release it early & let users help guide us through the way they think it should work.”  So, with the basics available, You Subscribe: RSS is available for you to try. Give it a look & help us craft what it turns into.

-e