Monday, April 22, 2002
AvantGo CEO on Custom Channels Policy
Posted by marlof in "ARTICLE" @ 08:35 AM
http://www.brighthand.com/newsite/features/avantgo.html
AvantGo received a lot of bad press recently for their plans on charging siteowners for the popularity of their site. One could only have 8 subscribers that set up a custom channel containing info from your site. If more would attempt to try subscribing, the channel was locked for the others. The only way around this would be to set up an official AvantGo channel. But that one comes at a premium price, not for the people reading, but for the ones serving the pages. That might be fine for real businesses, but for popular hobby sites like most PDA sites, that would be killing. Later on, people reported that they could still use their custom channels, and AvantGo seemed to be polishing up their custom channel policy.
In the interview Brighthand has published with the AvantGo CEO Richard Owen, he gives an explanation for this change of policy: "In retrospect, we may have been a bit heavy-handed sending out that notice to every publisher. What we had was about fifty companies abusing the service. Some were even developing full-fledged corporate apps using it, despite the fact it isn't secure. That's what we were targeting. We actually only turned off a couple of custom channels."
I selected AvantGo sync yet again after reading this interview and all my channels still worked. Yay! As I'm still not too happy with Mazingo speed, and Avantgo suddenly seems to be able to update channel content over GPRS (it kept locking my GPRS connection a few months ago), I'm giving it another go.
AvantGo received a lot of bad press recently for their plans on charging siteowners for the popularity of their site. One could only have 8 subscribers that set up a custom channel containing info from your site. If more would attempt to try subscribing, the channel was locked for the others. The only way around this would be to set up an official AvantGo channel. But that one comes at a premium price, not for the people reading, but for the ones serving the pages. That might be fine for real businesses, but for popular hobby sites like most PDA sites, that would be killing. Later on, people reported that they could still use their custom channels, and AvantGo seemed to be polishing up their custom channel policy.
In the interview Brighthand has published with the AvantGo CEO Richard Owen, he gives an explanation for this change of policy: "In retrospect, we may have been a bit heavy-handed sending out that notice to every publisher. What we had was about fifty companies abusing the service. Some were even developing full-fledged corporate apps using it, despite the fact it isn't secure. That's what we were targeting. We actually only turned off a couple of custom channels."
I selected AvantGo sync yet again after reading this interview and all my channels still worked. Yay! As I'm still not too happy with Mazingo speed, and Avantgo suddenly seems to be able to update channel content over GPRS (it kept locking my GPRS connection a few months ago), I'm giving it another go.
