CONTENT EVERYWHERE - Why RSS readers suck !

It never ceases to amaze me how much free content is available on the internet. Newspaper websites, portals, university classes, company news, online video, consumer product reviews,etc. But even so, getting to the content could still be a laborious and infuriating task -- technical progress was needed to help ...

1. find and search content (Google)
   
2. aggregate content
   
3. organize, group and rank content
   
4. effectively and conveniently present the content.

To get to this point wasn't easy. Free content is everywhere on the internet but we all needed a "Google" or "Yahoo" to search for it. Then the portals came... but these were ad heavy websites that gave us aggregation at the expense of a dozen flashy ads battling for your eyeballs and forcing us to remember another user login and profile

The real breakthrough in terms of digitally available content on the internet was syndication and the syndication standards that followed. The RSS standard was the major winner in this space and a sleuth of RSS readers (i.e. Google Reader) followed suit but they all suffer the same problem. They force you to seek out, collect and organize your feeds. Who really has the time for that? Some readers (or portals) provided master list of feeds but they usually contained a bunch of stuff you weren't interested in ... and many were never updated to reflect dead links or blogs.

Content is KING -- but you need to give it to the user in an effective, convenient and organized fashion and this is why we created our iHub line of applications. We have "content owners" that intelligently seek out, group and organize our content along with servers that constantly refresh and rebuild our composite feeds.

iHub Theory of Content Evolution
CONTENT --> SEARCH ENGINES --> RSS FEEDS --> RSS READERS --> iHUB

I'm excited -- Our iHubTechnology product is coming out soon. Get Ready To Get Your Geek On because we collected and organized the best tech feeds available today.... hardware, software, hacker, security, coding ... YUMMY!

iPhone App Submission - iHubHealth 1.0

Well... it took us a little longer then we anticipated but working on a software project with a distributed team effort can be difficult. The team invested loads of personal time, work time and a host of weekends and nights but we're finally done. We're pretty proud of our application - iHubHealth 1.0

and we just submitted the application to Apple... here's hoping on a seamless (and quick) release to the application store.

This application was more difficult than others because the content we had the team gather had to be vetted, organized, ranked, checked and rechecked over and over again. This is much easier said than done especially when you're dealing with dozens of blogs and hundreds of news channels. Blogs are real tricky... lots of good blogs that are stale or dead and lots of bad blogs that get updated daily. Your content people really have to take their time to read the blogs to make sure there not just commercial fronts with fluff content.

Along with the normal complexity of XML-based software development and Objective-C it became somewhat of a bear of a project. Anyway... the 80 hour weeks are over and we hope people enjoy the result.

We have an entire suite of these apps in the pipeline... we have most of the administrative applications complete and we have the entire server-side infrastructure complete too. We just need to write some web based UIs on to help administer and maintain the channels which we can push with dynamic updates to the devices.

Look for new titles every couple of weeks. Keep checking the blog for updates.