Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective.

00:00:05 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing news of note in iOS development, Apple, and the like.

00:00:07 ◼   ► I'm your host, David Smith. I'm an independent iOS and Mac developer based in Herne, Virginia.

00:00:12 ◼   ► This is show number 114, and today is Thursday, March 14th.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:20 ◼   ► All right, so yesterday was a rather exciting evening for me, and I'm going to unpack why.

00:00:23 ◼   ► So if you are someone who follows me on Twitter, or is in general in any way interested in tech news,

00:00:29 ◼   ► interested in tech news, you probably heard that yesterday, Google announced that they're

00:00:33 ◼   ► doing what they call spring cleaning. And as part of that spring cleaning, they're killing

00:00:37 ◼   ► off a bunch of products and sort of restructuring some things. And one of the more significant

00:00:42 ◼   ► parts is that they are killing the Google Reader RSS aggregator. They're just taking

00:00:47 ◼   ► it out back and never seeing it again. And so that was interesting to me because I think

00:00:53 ◼   ► I mentioned it in in vague and general terms before on the show. But for the last couple

00:00:58 ◼   ► of months, I've been working on a alternative RSS reader aggregator service slash app. And

00:01:05 ◼   ► so that rather, you know, their announcement, while not unexpected, I think it's something

00:01:10 ◼   ► that a lot of people have been thinking about was going to happen and sort of knew was going

00:01:13 ◼   ► to be coming at some point, that kind of changed my timeline a little bit. I'd always been

00:01:17 ◼   ► hoping to launch it sometime probably early June around WWDC. And I've been hoping that,

00:01:22 ◼   ► you know, Google would, you know, Sunset Reader, or announced that, you know, so sometime thereafter,

00:01:26 ◼   ► Well, it turns out I wasn't quite fast enough, and Google went ahead and announced that they're

00:01:31 ◼   ► killing it before I was quite ready to launch.

00:01:34 ◼   ► But so far, I think things will go okay, and I just kind of wanted to talk through a little

00:01:38 ◼   ► bit of the backstory, a little bit of an overview of it, and kind of explain where it's coming

00:01:42 ◼   ► from.

00:01:43 ◼   ► And it seemed like a good venue to do that and kind of unpack that a little bit.

00:01:48 ◼   ► So basically, I've been very frustrated with Google Reader for a while.

00:01:53 ◼   ► And I think the thing that frustrates me about it is that it doesn't seem like a great metaphor

00:01:56 ◼   ► for handling RSS, for the way that it does it,

00:02:00 ◼   ► isn't, it feels very, I don't know,

00:02:05 ◼   ► it feels very old or dated or kind of just

00:02:08 ◼   ► overly stuck in the past.

00:02:11 ◼   ► It feels a bit like, you know, it's like they treat RSS

00:02:13 ◼   ► as a way, almost like it's an email or something

00:02:15 ◼   ► that I'm getting, it's like, rather than I'm subscribing

00:02:18 ◼   ► to a feed, it's kind of like I'm subscribing

00:02:21 ◼   ► to a listserv and just sort of getting push notifications

00:02:23 ◼   ► all the time into an inbox.

00:02:24 ◼   ► And it never really sat well with me.

00:02:26 ◼   ► It doesn't work with the way that I use RSS.

00:02:30 ◼   ► I probably check RSS probably more than I should,

00:02:34 ◼   ► and probably maybe 10, 15 times a day

00:02:37 ◼   ► I'll check my RSS reader.

00:02:39 ◼   ► I'm not the kind of person who does,

00:02:41 ◼   ► I'm not a tech journalist or blogger in that kind of way,

00:02:44 ◼   ► or somebody who needs to constantly be on the front of it.

00:02:47 ◼   ► It's just that's part of how I like to get news.

00:02:50 ◼   ► I like having a sense of awareness of what's going on.

00:02:53 ◼   ► And so it's something that I use a lot,

00:02:55 ◼   ► Whenever I hit something that I use a lot,

00:02:57 ◼   ► but I find really frustrating,

00:02:59 ◼   ► I always try and think of,

00:03:00 ◼   ► well, what could I do to replace that?

00:03:01 ◼   ► What could I do to do that better?

00:03:03 ◼   ► And I think I've come up with some pretty interesting ways

00:03:05 ◼   ► of structuring RSS and processing it and managing it

00:03:09 ◼   ► that I think will make it a lot more straightforward to use

00:03:13 ◼   ► if you're someone like me who follows a lot of feeds,

00:03:16 ◼   ► someone who has a lot of things

00:03:17 ◼   ► that they're trying to manage and work through.

00:03:20 ◼   ► And not in a sense of, like,

00:03:22 ◼   ► I want to be able to subscribe to more feeds,

00:03:24 ◼   ► But I want to have my interaction with those be more meaningful and more straightforward.

00:03:28 ◼   ► And so that's essentially where I've been heading.

00:03:30 ◼   ► I'm not going to get into too much of the actual details of that.

00:03:32 ◼   ► I'll kind of unpack that as I go over the next couple of weeks as I get ready to launch

00:03:37 ◼   ► probably, I don't exactly know when yet, but soonish is really where I'm heading.

00:03:43 ◼   ► And then I want to kind of get us the without getting into too many of sort of the neat

00:03:47 ◼   ► tale, the nitty gritty details of exactly how I'm doing that.

00:03:51 ◼   ► I want to talk a little bit about what it will be

00:03:53 ◼   ► and what that is.

00:03:54 ◼   ► And I've forgotten a lot of questions about it,

00:03:55 ◼   ► so I kind of want to unpack what it is I'm building

00:03:58 ◼   ► and what it is, why I'm doing it,

00:04:00 ◼   ► and the approach I'm taking.

00:04:02 ◼   ► So first, I should probably say the name of the service

00:04:04 ◼   ► is Feed Wrangler.

00:04:05 ◼   ► This is one of those funny things with naming where--

00:04:08 ◼   ► I think a lot of people can get stuck on naming something

00:04:11 ◼   ► that you kind of can spend hours and hours going

00:04:13 ◼   ► around and around.

00:04:14 ◼   ► Feed Wrangler was just, in many ways,

00:04:16 ◼   ► just a working title that I had come up with for it.

00:04:19 ◼   ► And it was somewhat of a descriptive title and something

00:04:22 ◼   ► that I just had been throwing around and using.

00:04:26 ◼   ► And then yesterday when this happens, it's like, well,

00:04:28 ◼   ► I guess that's going to be the name, because I

00:04:30 ◼   ► don't have anything better.

00:04:31 ◼   ► And you have to put a name on something

00:04:33 ◼   ► if you're going to put it out.

00:04:34 ◼   ► So it's Feed Wrangler.

00:04:38 ◼   ► And so basically what Feed Wrangler is,

00:04:40 ◼   ► is it's going to be a service where there's

00:04:42 ◼   ► a couple of different components.

00:04:44 ◼   ► There'll be obviously the back end sync part of it,

00:04:48 ◼   ► which is an aggregator that goes around and you

00:04:50 ◼   ► have a variety of your feeds.

00:04:51 ◼   ► And you put it in there, and then it does all of its magic.

00:04:53 ◼   ► But it's handling that for you on the back end.

00:04:56 ◼   ► And that will be sort of then wrapped around

00:04:59 ◼   ► with a variety of different interfaces and ways

00:05:02 ◼   ► to get at that.

00:05:03 ◼   ► There will be a web interface, though I

00:05:06 ◼   ► expect the web interface is not the primary way

00:05:08 ◼   ► that I want or expect people to interact with it.

00:05:10 ◼   ► There will be a web interface, mostly just so

00:05:11 ◼   ► that it works for everybody.

00:05:13 ◼   ► And a lot of things are just easier

00:05:14 ◼   ► to do on the web in terms of managing subscriptions.

00:05:17 ◼   ► and a lot of those kinds of things are easier to do

00:05:22 ◼   ► on a website in an app.

00:05:25 ◼   ► And then there'll be a variety of first-party applications

00:05:28 ◼   ► that I'll be developing for it.

00:05:32 ◼   ► And then initially these are going to be on platforms

00:05:33 ◼   ► that are the ones that I care about,

00:05:35 ◼   ► or the ones that I know how to develop good apps for.

00:05:37 ◼   ► So initially iOS, going onto the Mac,

00:05:43 ◼   ► and potentially going somewhere else,

00:05:42 ◼   ► but my expectation is at least for the next forever,

00:05:45 ◼   ► probably, honestly, probably forever,

00:05:47 ◼   ► that'll be the ones that I work on as first party apps.

00:05:50 ◼   ► And then there'll be an open API that any app developer

00:05:54 ◼   ► on any platform can use to interact with it.

00:05:57 ◼   ► And the reason I can do that is that the app,

00:05:59 ◼   ► and the way that I'm gonna be structuring it

00:06:01 ◼   ► is on a subscription basis.

00:06:03 ◼   ► It's something that I feel pretty strongly about,

00:06:07 ◼   ► that a lot of people, you can kind of take it

00:06:09 ◼   ► to a variety of different business models with this,

00:06:11 ◼   ► But the kind of one that I want to do

00:06:13 ◼   ► is I want to build something with a sustainable, long-term

00:06:19 ◼   ► horizon on it.

00:06:20 ◼   ► That it's something that I can build and invest into and grow

00:06:23 ◼   ► and grow and really spend a lot of time making it really,

00:06:26 ◼   ► really good and really, really stable.

00:06:28 ◼   ► So I'm not the kind of person who's

00:06:29 ◼   ► then going to be making it something

00:06:31 ◼   ► that available for free.

00:06:32 ◼   ► There's a lot of services.

00:06:33 ◼   ► There's a lot of VC-funded companies.

00:06:35 ◼   ► There's a lot of people who would take that approach.

00:06:37 ◼   ► Whose goal it is to see how many people they can sort of snipe

00:06:39 ◼   ► off of Google Reader and put onto their platform.

00:06:42 ◼   ► It's a volume game.

00:06:43 ◼   ► And that's really not what I want to do with this.

00:06:45 ◼   ► What I want to do is I'm going to make it a paid subscription.

00:06:48 ◼   ► You know, exactly the pricing.

00:06:49 ◼   ► I'm not-- I haven't quite worked out--

00:06:50 ◼   ► or I'm not ready to announce yet,

00:06:52 ◼   ► but it'll be something that you pay per month

00:06:54 ◼   ► or you pay per year for an account.

00:06:56 ◼   ► And coming with that are a lot of great benefits

00:06:59 ◼   ► that I think will make that interaction much better.

00:07:02 ◼   ► There's a lot of economics in being an app developer that

00:07:04 ◼   ► are kind of awkward, that are kind of tricky.

00:07:06 ◼   ► And we've talked about this before on the show many times.

00:07:08 ◼   ► but things like not having paid upgrades makes some things kind of complicated, that it's

00:07:13 ◼   ► very hard to, the only way that you can make money is to get a new user, get a new download,

00:07:18 ◼   ► get a new sale, which means that you kind of have to skew a little bit how you work

00:07:22 ◼   ► on things and the way you work on things in kind of an odd way.

00:07:26 ◼   ► That it's hard to, at least conceptually, to be investing into that first person who

00:07:31 ◼   ► bought your app because you've probably gotten a lot of the, all of the money that you'll

00:07:36 ◼   ► you'll ever get from them.

00:07:37 ◼   ► And then you can do things to mitigate this.

00:07:39 ◼   ► You can do in-app purchases.

00:07:40 ◼   ► You can do kind of these, a fake paid upgrade

00:07:43 ◼   ► where you introduce a new app.

00:07:44 ◼   ► There's those kinds of things.

00:07:45 ◼   ► But what I would really want to do

00:07:47 ◼   ► is I would rather have a much smaller group of people

00:07:51 ◼   ► who really liked what I did, who liked my take on it,

00:07:54 ◼   ► who liked the way that I did it,

00:07:56 ◼   ► and who are set up on a recurring basis

00:08:00 ◼   ► to pay for that service.

00:08:01 ◼   ► If they're getting value from it every day,

00:08:03 ◼   ► then that's awesome.

00:08:05 ◼   ► And what I want to be able to do is to really focus in on that.

00:08:10 ◼   ► And so my service probably won't be for everybody.

00:08:12 ◼   ► But I don't really care in that I would far prefer to have

00:08:15 ◼   ► whatever, maybe a few thousand people who liked what I did

00:08:19 ◼   ► and who really used it than to have a million people

00:08:25 ◼   ► or a hundred thousand people or whatever it is

00:08:27 ◼   ► that only were using it because it was free

00:08:30 ◼   ► or because there was no barrier to getting into it.

00:08:34 ◼   ► What I want is people who really care about this,

00:08:36 ◼   ► and are who, you know, are, it's like I'm kind of

00:08:38 ◼   ► choosing my customers, rather than saying,

00:08:40 ◼   ► I want the world, I want a narrow group of people.

00:08:42 ◼   ► And obviously, you know, if that, if it turns out

00:08:44 ◼   ► a lot of people like it, and it grows and grows,

00:08:46 ◼   ► that's awesome, and you know, it's like scaling becomes

00:08:49 ◼   ► very easy if every person who's using your service

00:08:52 ◼   ► has given you money.

00:08:54 ◼   ► And so that's kind of the approach I'm taking.

00:08:56 ◼   ► And the secondary benefit of that is that it really

00:08:58 ◼   ► helps me with my ability to provide something like

00:09:02 ◼   ► an open API for other developers to use.

00:09:07 ◼   ► So what I want to do is I want to create a platform

00:09:09 ◼   ► that anybody who wants to write an app,

00:09:12 ◼   ► who wants to go in a different direction,

00:09:15 ◼   ► who wants to do something, can build an app for.

00:09:16 ◼   ► And it avoids this weird problem that if I made my money

00:09:18 ◼   ► selling an app or having a one-time fee

00:09:24 ◼   ► or those types of things, especially if I was making

00:09:26 ◼   ► my money selling apps, it gets really complicated

00:09:28 ◼   ► if other people start making apps that compete with them.

00:09:28 ◼   ► If other people start doing things that are alternatives

00:09:32 ◼   ► to what I'm doing, then they can kind of use the backend

00:09:35 ◼   ► without paying for the frontend.

00:09:36 ◼   ► And so to sort of flip that around, I'm just saying,

00:09:38 ◼   ► well, if you're going to have an account,

00:09:40 ◼   ► you're going to have paid for it.

00:09:42 ◼   ► And if that's the case, then I want to encourage and grow

00:09:45 ◼   ► and nurture as much as I can third party developers

00:09:48 ◼   ► on any platform, on competing platforms, whatever it is,

00:09:51 ◼   ► to be using-- for using that platform as their backend.

00:09:54 ◼   ► And I think that ultimately makes the user's life much

00:09:57 ◼   ► much better because they can get an app that is tailored

00:10:02 ◼   ► to their choices or is something that they're familiar with

00:10:06 ◼   ► or ready that just adds support.

00:10:08 ◼   ► And I can do that in a way that is very, very sustainable.

00:10:10 ◼   ► And so that's the approach that I'm going to be taking.

00:10:16 ◼   ► And so at launch, whenever that happens,

00:10:18 ◼   ► there'll be a web application, there'll be a couple

00:10:21 ◼   ► of native first-party applications which will be free

00:10:23 ◼   ► in the store because you would have already have paid

00:10:25 ◼   ► or the subscription, and then in many ways, those are,

00:10:29 ◼   ► I wouldn't say reference implementations.

00:10:31 ◼   ► They're not, it's not like they're going to be fully

00:10:33 ◼   ► featured clients and fully featured things that you could

00:10:37 ◼   ► use and be happy with all the time.

00:10:39 ◼   ► There are apps that I've been using actually for a while,

00:10:43 ◼   ► but they're going to be in the store as a starting point

00:10:47 ◼   ► for where you can go, and then you can explore out

00:10:50 ◼   ► from there.

00:10:52 ◼   ► Something that obviously, it's maybe a bit of a stretch,

00:10:54 ◼   ► something that I would love to see is to have something

00:10:59 ◼   ► like this be a new playground for UI concepts,

00:11:02 ◼   ► be a new playground for innovative ways

00:11:04 ◼   ► to display this data.

00:11:05 ◼   ► I remember that sort of in some ways,

00:11:07 ◼   ► there was this sort of this golden age of Twitter apps

00:11:11 ◼   ► where everybody kept trying to find different ways

00:11:13 ◼   ► of displaying a very similar basic set of data.

00:11:16 ◼   ► And that was really, really awesome in that you could,

00:11:20 ◼   ► you know, you can find something that fits you exactly.

00:11:23 ◼   ► And obviously it's a little complicated because,

00:11:25 ◼   ► and this is something that I've written about

00:11:26 ◼   ► a little bit with app.net, is depending on how many users

00:11:29 ◼   ► I have will dictate exactly how attractive that is

00:11:33 ◼   ► to third-party developers.

00:11:34 ◼   ► But hopefully the way that I'm structuring it

00:11:37 ◼   ► and the ways that I can invest in that

00:11:39 ◼   ► will make that at least somewhat compelling.

00:11:41 ◼   ► And hopefully the user base will be large enough

00:11:42 ◼   ► that it'll be an interesting prospect as well.

00:11:46 ◼   ► But what I would love to see is to have that be an area

00:11:48 ◼   ► that we get into.

00:11:49 ◼   ► And that by creating something that's an open and public API

00:11:51 ◼   ► that anybody can write an app towards.

00:11:54 ◼   ► And making that as easy as possible,

00:11:55 ◼   ► it's like I'm an iOS developer.

00:11:57 ◼   ► I can make a nice iOS SDK.

00:11:58 ◼   ► I can make integrating with my service as easy as possible,

00:12:02 ◼   ► because that's something that I'm very familiar with.

00:12:06 ◼   ► And that's a focus of what I'll be doing.

00:12:08 ◼   ► And I'll be sort of dog fooding my own API.

00:12:10 ◼   ► It's like my client will be using the same API

00:12:13 ◼   ► that everyone else will.

00:12:14 ◼   ► And so I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

00:12:17 ◼   ► And then I'll just have to see where that goes,

00:12:19 ◼   ► and see where that ends up.

00:12:22 ◼   ► But that's kind of what I'm doing,

00:12:23 ◼   ► and that's what I've been working on.

00:12:24 ◼   ► So I had a few other plans, I had a couple other things

00:12:27 ◼   ► that I was probably going to be doing,

00:12:28 ◼   ► but as they say, you just kind of got to roll with it,

00:12:32 ◼   ► or maybe another way, another adage would be that

00:12:37 ◼   ► luck favors the prepared in the sense that

00:12:40 ◼   ► I'm kind of happy in terms of the way

00:12:42 ◼   ► that this is playing out, and that I'm well positioned

00:12:45 ◼   ► to take advantage of Google letting go of its users

00:12:49 ◼   ► and kind of turning their back on them in a way

00:12:51 ◼   ► that I'll be able to hopefully provide

00:12:52 ◼   ► an interesting alternative fairly quickly,

00:12:54 ◼   ► and certainly before July 1 when Google Reader gets a sunset.

00:12:59 ◼   ► So basically, that's the overview.

00:13:00 ◼   ► If you have questions about this, please let me know.

00:13:03 ◼   ► I'm happy to talk about it at a high level,

00:13:05 ◼   ► and then I'll be talking about exactly what it's like about

00:13:07 ◼   ► some of the specifics over time.

00:13:09 ◼   ► So I'm obviously not going to get

00:13:10 ◼   ► into exactly the nuances of how I'm

00:13:12 ◼   ► going to be approaching the problem and those types

00:13:14 ◼   ► of things until it's ready to be made more public.

00:13:16 ◼   ► But if you're kind of curious about conceptually

00:13:18 ◼   ► what's going to be going on and how I'm doing it.

00:13:22 ◼   ► Certainly stay tuned to the show.

00:13:23 ◼   ► I'm going to probably, this is probably,

00:13:25 ◼   ► in some ways like I used to, when I talked about

00:13:27 ◼   ► Check the Weather, I'll kind of be talking about it.

00:13:29 ◼   ► This is something I'll be talking about on the show,

00:13:31 ◼   ► about kind of how I'm going about this

00:13:33 ◼   ► and some of the technical things

00:13:34 ◼   ► as well as the marketing and logistical side of things.

00:13:36 ◼   ► But always, you can let me know on Twitter.

00:13:38 ◼   ► I'm underscore David Smith there.

00:13:40 ◼   ► David Smith on AppNet.

00:13:41 ◼   ► David@developingperspective.com is a great way to reach me

00:13:44 ◼   ► if you have questions or thoughts.

00:13:45 ◼   ► And I'm going to have a link in the show notes.

00:13:47 ◼   ► I put up a sign up form on feedrangler.net,

00:13:52 ◼   ► just one word, feedrangler.net,

00:13:54 ◼   ► and I'll have a link in the show notes.

00:13:55 ◼   ► And basically, if you're interested in the service,

00:13:58 ◼   ► or interested in hearing news or updates about it,

00:14:00 ◼   ► kind of when it's ready for public consumption,

00:14:02 ◼   ► or if I have any updates,

00:14:03 ◼   ► I'm just kind of putting together a mailing list

00:14:05 ◼   ► so I can send out communications to that.

00:14:07 ◼   ► So go ahead and sign up there if you're interested.

00:14:09 ◼   ► But otherwise, yeah, that's it.

00:14:11 ◼   ► It'll be an interesting couple of weeks,

00:14:13 ◼   ► couple of months, I think.

00:14:15 ◼   ► But it should be pretty exciting,

00:14:16 ◼   ► and hopefully you'll enjoy hearing about it on the show.

00:14:19 ◼   ► But yeah, I'm a little overwhelmed,

00:14:20 ◼   ► a little glad I just,

00:14:22 ◼   ► glad I have a lot of coffee in my house

00:14:25 ◼   ► that I can work my way through.

00:14:27 ◼   ► But it's like, speaking of shows,

00:14:29 ◼   ► too bad 'cause I was talking about burnout.

00:14:30 ◼   ► I'm not the kind of person who will go nuts about this.

00:14:33 ◼   ► It's like, I never want to work to a point that

00:14:37 ◼   ► I'm going to be sort of be unsustainable,

00:14:39 ◼   ► so but I'll just be, I think my wife said it well,

00:14:41 ◼   ► it's like, you're probably going to work

00:14:42 ◼   ► about the same number of hours,

00:14:44 ◼   ► you're just going to be working twice as fast.

00:14:46 ◼   ► to kind of really be motivated and really be engaged.

00:14:48 ◼   ► So I'm kind of looking forward to that,

00:14:50 ◼   ► and I hope you join me for the ride.

00:14:51 ◼   ► Thanks, bye.