NewsGator announces user base milestones; Newsgator is something of a quiet revolution these days. It isn’t announcing flashy features like Google Reader or Yahoo Pipes, but today it announced that more than one million people use NewsGatorÄôs consumer RSS solutions, and its RSS platform is accessed over 10 million times per day by users of NewsGatorÄôs desktop client products. The company also remarked that NewsGator has archived more than 1.5 billion articles from RSS feeds in NewsGator Online. Newsgator has always been known for the range of products it has, but I hadn’t realized it includes a browser toolbar, desktop notifier and a screen saver!
Sun to announce Flash, Silverlight competitor; According to InfoWorld, today at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, “Sun will roll out a Java-based product family called JavaFX, which covers Java development from the desktop to the Web to mobile devices.” It’s going to be a competitor to the recent Microsoft Silverlight, although at this point Sun appears to be positioning it mainly as an alternative to AJAX. Ryan Stewart has more details.
RSS web feeds for tags at Amazon.com; Ian McAllister from Amazon notes that Amazon’s Customer Communities team just rolled out tag-based RSS feeds. This has long been a pet topic on Read/WriteWeb, so I will be looking into it later today. The Help page on Amazon.com has more details for now. Suggested use cases include widgets and mashups, plus the RSS tags include support for affiliates.
ThinkFree launches Docs, other enhancements; there’s been a lot of action in the Web Office space of late, with the Comcast and ShareOffice offerings which we’ve covered this week. Established Web Office suite vendor ThinkFree seems to be heading in a very ‘social networking’ direction, with the announcement of ThinkFree Docs – which is described as being “all about finding and sharing your docs with the broader community of ThinkFree users.” The company refers to it as “the Flickr of Office docs”. See R/WW’s earlier coverage of ThinkFree Docs a month ago. ThinkFree has also increased sharing capabilities within ThinkFree Online – including more control over how others interact with documents you share, and the ability to post your docs to blog sites. The ThinkFree blog has more details about their focus on social networking.
