Symphonious

I love the fact that I can read my feeds in NetNewsWire and on my iPhone seamlessly, but there’s one really annoying aspect that’s almost driving me to turn off syncing for a large number of feeds: NewsGator is days or weeks out of date for many feeds.

When syncing is enabled in NetNewsWire it no longer downloads feeds directly, but instead gets them from NewsGator which is how all the syncing magic works. This leads to much faster sync times but also means that you can’t actually refresh your feeds to find what’s new. All the refresh button does now is check NewsGator and there’s no way to check directly with the site itself.

A little while back I read, and now can’t find, an article about how NewsGator decides when to sync new feeds based on how often they change and how popular they are. This is a terrible algorithm to apply - any personalized feed winds up very out of date. Good luck to you if you happen to have something that’s important but infrequent coming through a personalized feed - I’ve seen it take a week or more to pick up new items.

It’s a real shame because the syncing is fantastic. Here’s hoping someone like Google buys them out and teaches them a thing or two about crawling the web at a reasonable speed.

Kevin Gamble has an excellent post Enterprise 2.0– working in the open:

A week doesn't go by where I don't hear from some administrative group who wants to work in a wiki, but wants their work to be private. When this happens I almost always tell them, "Then a wiki isn't for you. If you want to collaborate with a small group where no one else can see it use Google Docs."

It’s amazingly common for people to want to work in a private little sandbox until they have everything perfect and then reveal it to the world. The trouble is, this almost entirely eliminates the opportunities for collaboration because people can’t see the content until it’s completed. What’s the value in reviewing and adding to a document that the author already thinks is done?

If you really want to collaborate you need more than just new tools, you need new attitudes. You need to put aside the fear of being wrong or looking incompetent by publishing too early and have some confidence in yourself and your colleagues to find and highlight the good content and strip away the bad. It’s not an easy change to make because it requires trust and understanding between you and your colleagues, but it’s the only way to work better together.

I got just got home from a very entertaining evening with some folk from the Web Content 2008 conference watching, or rather largely ignoring, an overall boring game of basketball between two teams I didn’t know from a bar of soap (for the record, the Celtics won and were premiers or something). Anyway, I found in my email an entire conversation within Ephox around this article on CMS Wire about the talk I gave today. It’s actually a very good summary of what I said and I hadn’t realized there was anyone from CMS Wire even at the conference (Rachelle, please do say hello tomorrow if you get this, I don’t know what you look like).

It’s simply amazing how fast news travels these days, within 12 hours a speech I’d given in Chicago had been written about by CMS Wire, noticed by Google which sent an alert to our engineering manager in Australia and then got replies from a couple of people within our US office, all while I was out at the pub drinking, developing strategic business relationships (Seth, you’re going to write lots more good stuff about Ephox now right?). That’s really very cool.

I’ve seen in a few places people getting excited about the upcoming support for Google Gears in WordPress as a way to locally cache common files so they don’t have to be downloaded repeatedly. For instance, this article from Geniosity Musings:

But, some of the new features (and features I’ve just started using now that I use the Visual Editor) just aren’t as cool thanks to the not-so-great internet speeds in South Africa.

For example, if you want to create a link. Every time you click the link icon in the editor’s toolbar, it has to download the same stuff over and over…

Well, it looks to me like the WordPress Google Gears implementation has solved that. The link and the “insert embedded media” popups are now instantaneous!

Now Google Gears is cool technology and I’m sure there are lots of interesting things you can do with it, but reimplementing HTTP caching seems pretty stupid to me. If your browser is downloading the same stuff over and over, it’s because the server is adding the wrong caching headers and it’s not that hard to fix, without Gears. HTTP includes all these wonderful headers that control what and how things should be cached precisely to speed up the kind of use case mentioned above.

I just hope that it’s easy to turn off the use of gears so life can be kept simple.

Kevin Gamble echoes an increasingly common theme at the moment, complaining that some US ISPs are trialling metered internet plans instead of unlimited data:

This is serious stuff. This is an both an economic and freedom issue. Changing the way the Internet works means people will be less likely to share and to try innovative things. If you don't think this will impact the quality of your Internet experience you are dead wrong. It will make a massive difference in changing people's online behavior.

Here’s the thing though - metered internet plans are not a new idea. They’re not even unusual, they’re just a way of life for a huge number of people, like say pretty much anyone in Australia. You don’t have a civil right to unmetered internet access any more than you do to unmetered electricity.

In fact, the comparison to electricity is a particularly apt one given how much people are talking about the commoditization of commuting and internet access these days. As things become more of a commodity pricing plans tend to get better at charging people for what they use instead of subsidizing the cost across all users. That’s what the US internet companies are doing now. If they charge people for what they actually use, they can offer cheaper internet access to the light users and still cover the costs of heavy users. Now, I love my unlimited data plan here in the UK but I realize that my heavy use is being subsidized by lighter users.

Will this affect innovation on the internet? Nope. People will pay for the level of internet access they need or want and be happy with it, just like people pay for the amount of electricity they need to run their computer and don’t worry about it. If unlimited internet access really is demanded by a large number of people (who aren’t just heavy users wanting their usage subsidized) then there will be a market opportunity to provide that so vote with your feet. I suspect you’ll find the vast majority of users will quite enjoy having cheaper, faster internet though and it will be the heavy users that go off in search of alternatives.

This is mostly clueless corporate types changing the very dynamics which have made the Internet work.

Nope, this is just economics at work. The internet will keep ticking along quite happily despite the temporary gnashing of teeth that geeks will go through.