Interview: Brent Simmons, Developer of NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire is the most popular Newsreader client on the Macintosh.  It isn't just my favorite, the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and many others mark it as their favorite way to read news on the Mac.  

The software is free with advertisements, but is $14.99 (or $9.99 today) and use it without ads.  The ads, however, are very small and fit in the bottom left quadrant and are not intrusive.

NetNewsWire is also on the iPhone (App Store Link).

I thought it would be interesting to talk to Brent Simmons, the developer behind NetNewsWire, about the recent changes in the application, how he plans on integrating social services like Twitter and where development is heading.

Thanks for taking time away of your busy development work to chat.  First thing: I've been a huge fan of your software for as long as I can remember (I think it went 1.0 in 2003?)

You got it -- NetNewsWire 1.0 was in early 2003. The 1.0 of NetNewsWire Lite was in late 2002

How many copies of NNW v3 are out there (if you don't mind me asking)? It is one of the first things I put on a new Mac and I wonder how many other people use it as a default application?

NetNewsWire is very popular software. I kind of have to forget about how popular it is most of the time or I'd be paralyzed knowing that I can't possibly please that many people. So I tend to think of it as relatively intimate: me and 100 friends. But it's many orders of magnitude beyond that.

I've noticed you've done a few high profile apps - like AllThingsD. Is that where you spend most of your time now?  Or does NNW keep you busy?

I have three products: NetNewsWire for Mac, NetNewsWire for iPhone, and TapLynx. TapLynx is a framework for people who want to make iPhone apps like the All Things Digital app.

All three products are closely related, of course: they share code, and they're all feed readers. Often I'm working on two or three at the same time when I'm working on a given piece of code.

The situation is such that I couldn't really say where I spend most of my time. For instance, soon I'm hoping to get posting to Facebook working in TapLynx and NetNewsWire for iPhone. But it will be just one piece of code.

Although many customers were vocal opponents of your decision to go to Google Reader as an online reader/sync solution, I think it turned out pretty well.  I see a lot of synergy there.  Were you surprised?  What went into that decision?

It's funny -- the pissed-off people always speak up, and happy people usually happily keep quiet.

For the year-and-a-half before switching to Google Reader, the biggest feature request *by far* was that we switch over to Google Reader syncing. And so there are lots of people glad we made the change.

I am interested in what you are doing with NNW.  Especially as it relates to Twitter.  I am finding for the first time I am using Tweetie/Tweetdeck/Twitterific as much as NNW to get a my favorite site feeds.  It isn't a replacement, but it is becoming my new "first click".  I see on Inessential that version 4.0 of NNW is coming up.  Anything you can talk about that will build some more excitement?

NetNewsWire has gone through several big changes in its seven-year lifetime. The first was its very existence -- the first desktop app RSS reader for Mac OS X. It was a huge hit for the time, way surpassing my expectations.

I'll say this: I'm obsessed with how people get their news, with what helps, what slows people down, what's too difficult, what's overload, what's not enough. I'm obsessed with how news circulates: with what people do with it once they have it, where it goes, how it gets to someone else, how someone else decides to read it or not. My obsession is the entire economy of news.

What are your thoughts on feed parsing utilities like Yahoo Pipes?  Is there a future here?  

Would NNW venture into this area?

I like Yahoo Pipes. I'm not sure what the value is to Yahoo -- unless it's attention data, learning more about what feeds people read, what they filter in, what they filter out, etc.

NetNewsWire has a very basic capability: you can create "smart lists" which pull news items from different feeds you already subscribe to. Would it be cool to go beyond that? Absolutely.

If I want to share my feeds with someone else with NNW, I send my feed list as a downloadable file for people to import if they wish.  IS this the best way to go about doing something like this?  This might be better just to do as a Google-Reader-share?

People often make their subscriptions list available as OPML. I think it's a cool thing to do. But I sure wish there was an easier way to check these out other than having to download it to disk then import it. (Which is probably just a hint to myself.)

Also, I was wondering about your defaults - the feeds you get as default when you download NNW.  Is being a default a paid thing (if it isn't it should be!) or is it just your favorite feeds.  Do you have numbers on how much traffic you've sent to these sites?

It's not a paid thing. I decide. It's feeds I think NetNewsWire users would find interesting or valuable.

I don't have numbers on how much traffic it sends. For the past few years I've been asking permission of a feed owner before making their feed a default (everybody has said yes, as you might imagine), and I warn them that their bandwidth use may go up. Does it? By how much? I don't know.

NNW recently was updated with an adveritising model option rather than stricly a pay-saftware model.  Is the advertising model working out for NNW?  Again, I really liked the option - it made NNW much easier to reccomend, but its introduction put others off (perhaps because there breifly wasn't a paid option?)  How many pageviews does a user have to see for you to make up the former cost of the software?

It's working out, yes. What I like best about is that people can keep using the software for free if they want to.

That said, it does send a strong message when someone buys the software. It says that they like NetNewsWire, they want to see all the cool stuff in store for NetNewsWire, and they're serious enough about it to put up some money.

Have you considered alternative methods of monetization?  

For instance, Affiliate feeds from Amazon or the App Store?

I haven't thought about those feeds in particular, though certainly the idea of charging to be placed in the defaults-for-new-users has come up as an idea. How much would someone pay for that? Beats me.

Apple is likely going to release a Tablet-type device at some point soon.  I see an RSS reader as one of the fundamental apps that would make this thing great.  You are currently on the iPhone and the Mac. How do you see NNW on a tablet?

I see it on a tablet as soon as possible!

I don't know anything about a tablet from Apple. I can imagine it would be a *very* cool device, and I know I'd want one. But other than that I know nothing.

As a feed reader, how do you feel about full feed vs. partial feed? Would you rather have everything in the feedreader or do you like clicking through to the story if it is worthy, saving bandwidth in the process.

For anything but the shortest of stories, I click through (or right-arrow through) -- I open the web page in a tab in NetNewsWire. (That's my reading process: go through my unread items, opening in tabs the ones I want to read. Then I go through my tabs.)

Lots of NetNewsWire users prefer full-text feeds. For them, I say: full-text, please. (But I do understand the reasons for *not* doing full-text.)

Do you have any other observations about the state of Feeds in general? Feedburner?  Pheedo? etc?

I think we've witnessed the feed-ification of the web in the past few years. Not only is everything available as a feed these days (not always RSS -- could be Atom, JSON, or some other format) but we're seeing feed-like user interfaces everywhere. Twitter looks like a feed. Facebook looks like a feed. Call them streams if you want, call them whatever: it's still the idea of the list, usually sorted by date and time.

I myself haven't used either service. (I signed up for FeedBurner once, but didn't end up using it.) I keep meaning to, but I have a lot of software to work on. ;)

You can follow Brent at brentsimmons on Twitter or his blog, Inessential.