Picking the Outbrain of Awasu's founder

Instead of the usual new client announcement we thought it would be interesting to interview one of the newest partners to integrate the Outbrain rating system into their rss reader.  Introducing Taka from Awasu!  Taka is the man behind Awasu, which is widely heralded as a powerful rss reader for serious information brokers.  Get to know the man, the mission and his reader!

Q: Why Did You Build Awasu?
To scratch an itch :-) It was inspired by another project I had just finished at the time. We actually hadn't even heard of RSS when we started and it was originally a generalized, scriptable information-gathering engine. Finding out about RSS was such a revelation since it fit in perfectly with what we were doing.

Q: Biggest Challenges Facing RSS Readers Today?
The same challenges as yesterday :-| Persuading people of the value of RSS and making it easy for them to use. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: most people don't realize how useful it is until they actually start using it but it's still too difficult for your average Joe to figure it all out.  Which reader to use, finding feeds on a website (if they're there at all), RSS or Atom, how to subscribe. And so on...

Q: Where is RSS Going in the future?
RSS needs to be in the background and out of sight. The real benefit of this technology is not monitoring blogs but computer-to-computer interaction, especially when you hook it up with some of the key ideas behind the Semantic Web. Feed readers embedded in the browser are a good start to making the technology more widely accessible but once you start to collect more than a few feeds, it starts to get a bit unwieldy. There will always be a place for programs like Awasu for larger-scale, serious information management.

Q: What's Ahead for Awasu in 08?
Computer-to-computer interaction is the fundamental principle;
that Awasu was built upon. We've built a solid base of a feed reader and will be focusing on adding more advanced features to manage, analyze and respond to the incoming information.

Q: Craziest Support Question?
I think I've become completely inured to crazy support questions - nothing comes to mind.

Q: Your Must Read Blogs & Why?
Not your traditional techie stuff.

Global Voices Online is one of my favorites. I spend a lot of time in developing nations, often semi-offline, and it never ceases to amaze me how unimportant most of what happens in the technical world is.  This feed keeps reminding me of that when I'm back at my desk and there's so much stuff coming in, I can't possibly keep up.

Ethan Zuckerman also gives a good insight into what's happening in the developing world.

As a musician, Raven 'n' Blues is my favorite podcast, a blues show hosted by the inimitable Dave Raven.

Q: Thoughts on the APML movement, OpenID and OpenSocial for RSS readers?
I'm yet to be convinced of a wider usefulness for APML. I can understand why some hardcore information junkies are calling out for it but I don't see most people having much use for it. Advertisers and marketers, however, are surely drooling over access to such information. NewsGator recently making their feed readers free in "exchange" for monitoring what you're reading is a case in point. It's not a deal I find particularly appealing.  OpenID and OpenSocial don't have much direct impact on RSS but as I said above, these will be the foundational components used to build the next generation of systems, out of sight from the user but providing the core underlying services.

Q: The last movie you thought was great?
"American Gangster" was excellent, although ultimately a little disappointing. "Stardust" was a hoot :-)

Q: The last book you read that was great?
A friend recently recommended F. Sionil Jose, probably the foremost Filipino writing in English. I've just started "Viajero", a history of the Filipino diaspora, and it's shaping up to be pretty good.