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The Life

This is a tremendous read for every software developer who works on his own or in a small company. It outlines what happened this past week with the acquisition of NetNewsWire, the Mac RSS reader by NewsGator.

It was found from Scripting News but it's so hard to read everything in there that I've separated the link.

It's hard to imagine the days of indie sw developers but there are lots of them. Rick Strahl manages to straddle being both primary coder and the business person behind West-Wind, along with other various jobs. But it's certainly not the life for everyone, especially when you develop an RSS reader that is being used by thousands of people.

But it would also do well for those "shocked" about the purchase to realize that Newsgator started as one of those types of tools as well and only became the entity it is in the past little while.

NewsGator is in an interesting position - while today, they can claim to be one of the leading (if not the leading) RSS aggregator companies - they are also in the arena that is waiting for the 600 pound elephant (named Microsoft) to arrive. With their acquisitions and new tools, I think they are heading the right way - for example, with a Newsgator subscription, you can view your feeds on virtually every device (Mac, PDA, Win, Outlook, MediaCenter, Linux, etc) and still only get the LATEST news - not just all of it.

They've also made it easy to localize which information you want to read on various sites. This reminds me of Rick Borup's post about too much information. With NewsGator, you might set up your PDA to only look at specific sites whereas your Outlook may get all of them and your Media Center may only show family oriented feeds. It's a great solution because it's something that although they are aware of it, Microsoft isn't dealing with it head-on in IE 7 (where the solutions are expected to be machine-based).


So read The Life - it helps show the reality of the single developer with that one great idea.

Daring Fireball: The Life

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