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Thanks Carl and Richard allowing me to participate in .NET Rocks! (http://www.dotnetrocks.com/) June 26th show.

We recently updated the NNTP server that runs news://forums.asp.net.

About once a day I get an email from either LinkedIn (url purposefully not included) or Plaxo (again, url purposefully not included).

Let’s talk about Plaxo first. Here’s the scenario: you want to keep your address book up-to-date so Plaxo (amongst others) is the “free” service you choose. Have you ever read the fine print? Basically if Plaxo sells their business your privacy rights go out the window because they can sell your contact information too. Don’t get me wrong, Plaxo is a great idea in theory — but I guess I just don’t grok the difficulty of mananaging an address book without it. Also, maybe I’m paranoid but basically Plaxo is a direct marketers ideal tool — people enter in and then help validate hundreds of thousands of email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses. Gee, I’m excited about all the new junk and spam mail I’m sure I’m soon to recieve. Thanks.

Then there is “Linked In”. Linked in is viral marketing at its best and utterly annoying …and, I’ll admit it, I keep getting sucked in thinking that having a “network” will someone result in some uber positive experience. So far… nada mucho. Linked in appeals to the type “A” personalities that like to compete and play ego warfare. I mean, so what if you’ve got a network 5,000 plus people. Is that even useful? Personally, I would think the people with smaller < 50 people lists are more valuable.

Part of my skepticism comes from trying to understand what business both Plaxo and Link In are in and how they make their money. Nothing is free and it just seems like both of these companies are helping build a direct marketers dream “customer” database.

Btw, I’m in Linked In as rhoward@telligent.com …see? It’s just addictive 🙂

[update]

Stacy from Plaxo sent me a nice mail to inform me that my information wasn’t exactly correct about Plaxo:

The truth is – if Plaxo sells our business – your privacy rights (and the rights of any Plaxo member) do NOT go out the window. Your privacy rights are maintained exactly as is – safe and secure.

She adds a lot more that I snipped out (I imagine they must hear this a lot). Thanks Stacy, that’s great news! Too be honest that does make Plaxo a lot more appealing.

The endless debate: should you use web based forums or newsgroups? Web based forums, such as those at http://forums.asp.net are great because they provide a rich interactive experience and foster true communities. News groups, on the other hand, are fast simple and support offline as well as online reading.

Unfortunately the technology usually divides the communities – just look at http://forums.asp.net vs. the Microsoft ASP.NET news groups at news://news.microsoft.com. Both ‘communities’ have expert and knowledgeable contributors, but have isolated themselves from one another due to preference in technology.

One of our long standing goals at Telligent is to remove the technology barriers for collaborative communities through Community Server. I’m happy to announce that we’ve been piloting NNTP support for the http://forums.asp.net site and we’re now ready to announce it publicly:

news://forums.asp.net

Using the same login credentials for http://forums.asp.net you can now use any RFC compliant news reader, such as Outlook Express, to connect to, browse, read, reply, and post either online or offline.

If you want to learn more about the Community Server NNTP Server — a commercial add-on for Community Server — visit www.communityserver.org (currently available as a release candidate).

Microsoft has this funny little tradition: on your yearly anniversary with the company people would buy a 1 pound bag of M&Ms for each year of their anniversary, e.g. 5 lbs == 5 years, and put them outside of their office door.

We have a pound of M&Ms at our office today (June 1st) is Telligent’s 1 year anniversary (WOO HOO)!!!

Full details

Version 1.1 is a performance focused release. We will also release our NNTP Server (use it at news://communityserver.org) within the next several days.

Planning for Version 1.2, the theme of which is “simplicity” has already started.

Scott Watermasysk put together a cool little utility for people that want to browse the Community Server code base:

http://code.communityserver.org

Awesome news — we’ve got two more people joining the team at Telligent:

Dan Bartles – Dan has done some awesome work with both DotNetNuke and Community Server. Dan has been a community contributor to Community Server and now joins the team as one of our full time developer on Community Server.

Kevin Harder – Kevin has also accepted a position with Telligent as another one of our full time developers on Community Server. He also was one of our Community contributors, Kevin most recently wrote a .Text to Community Server convertor.

We’re really looking forward to both Dan and Kevin joining our team fulltime. We’re putting the finishing touches on version 1.1 of Community Server and our theme for version 1.2 (complete roadmap) is simplicity.

It’s hard to believe it’s been less than a year (June 1 is Telligent’s one year anniversary) and we’ve got 27 people on board!

Woohoo!!! CodeSmith 3.0 released on Monday May 16th!

Download CodeSmith 3.0 now
CodeSmith 3.0 free 30 day trial.

Learn more about CodeSmith 3.0
Visit www.codesmithtools.com 

Code generation tools represent one of the most interesting areas where a tremendous amount of innovation opportunity still exists for improving the software development process. By automating the process of creating framework, database access, or other common/repeated code patters developers can save time, companies can save money, and users of the end product will get better solutions. Why? Instead of spending hours repeating the same logic flows, data access layers, or implementation frameworks just write it once as a CodeSmith template. That’s right — using .NET code you can write a template for how you want your code to be generated. It’s still your code with your formatting your comments and your style — CodeSmith just helps you write it faster. In fact, you could say it’s like hiring your own personal army of developers!

If you haven’t experimented with code generation before — and even if you are already familiar with it — I would highly recommend checking out CodeSmith 3.0. It will change the way you think and write your software.

At Telligent we’re so convinced in the importance of code generation that we partnered with Eric Smith, the founder and creator of CodeSmith, to found CodeSmith Tools, LLC.

“With DotNetNuke and Telligent Community Server, both part of the Web Site Starters for Windows partner applications, we are able to offer our customers a number of new compelling applications and services,” said Warren Adelman, chief operating officer at GoDaddy. “For example, our customers can take advantage of portal builders, forums, blogs and photo galleries. These commonly requested applications will help us attract more customers to our Windows-based offers.”

Very cool!

Read the complete press release here…

We’ve made a lot of updates to www.communityserver.org (running version 1.1 of Community Server which is not yet released).