Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Editor's Desk & NewsGator Buzz 2.0 Beta

The project I've been working on since December, Editor's Desk and Buzz 2.0, has finally been released to public beta! If you don't know what that means, it's basically a way of getting content (news, pictures, video, whatever you can get an RSS feed for), and putting it on your site.

There are similar offerings from a number of places, including Google. It's always a bit nerve-wracking to be competing with Google, but frankly you can do a lot more with our product than any of the others that I'm aware of. Check out the gallery page for some examples. You know it's cool, so just go sign up for your own demo account. Go to Newsgator News and click the "Add Buzz To Your Site Today" link in the upper right.

Also, since we're on the topic of beta software, Newsgator has a sick number of betas out right now. The count is somewhere around 10. I can't remember them all (or probably talk about them all), but some of them are Inbox, NG Online, NG Desktop, NetNewsWire, NG Enterprise OnDemand, and Go J2ME. So I think we need a new motto for NewsGator:

"NewsGator... we release more betas before 9 AM than most startups do before they go bankrupt!"

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice. There were a few parody taglines that came to mind using your format, but I didn’t feel I could really rip on NewsGator (outside of the fact you guys have an automated answering system) since your beta library is quite impressive. I shall have to browse more before I judge your superiority to Google. Maybe having you cease to use Gmail would be a start to convincing me…

BKR said...

Hey, I just said our news widgets are better than Google's. I also think our reader is better than theirs. Other than that, we don't really overlap. But if there was NGMail, I'd totally use it instead of GMail. :)

So did you actually call our sales? I'm surprised.

Anonymous said...

Will have to overcome laziness and check out the beta reader.

Calling NG is hardly surprising given my sparse troubleshooting abilities. I had to call when I first signed up for NGOnline, as I was having trouble accessing from work. (It was a permission problem on my end - big shocker) I got to a live (and helpful in a non-condescending way) person pretty quickly, but I am always quite annoyed when looking for help and am forced to navigate an automated call system on top of my original frustration. Maybe I should embody Stephen Colbert and put NG on notice...

BKR said...

Um, we don't actually offer phone support for consumer-level products. So I'm surprised you managed to actually get someone on the phone in the first place. But all three of the support guys are really nice, so I'm sure they would be nice if you managed to get them on the phone.

For the record, the preferred methods of support for NewsGator consumer products are the forums or email.

Anonymous said...

Ah, I see the glitch now. I didn't realize I was supposed to identify myself as being "consumer-level". hehe, you should see me talk to credit card companies. I got skills, man. okay if I really had skills I wouldn't need to call in the first place.

NewsGator support is top rate, since no one bothered to tell me I had to ask my question over email. apparently YOUR email will now be my ask NG forum...