02-18-2002, 08:39 AM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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AvantGo Custom Channels Shutting Down
http://ami.avantgo.com/support/mobile_support/
Special thanks to Bill Gilam and Terry Manns for bringing this to my attention. In two days, AvantGo will no longer be spidering this site and your custom channels will break:
"Effective February 20, 2002, AvantGo Mobile Internet Service will be changing our custom channel policy. Our new Custom Channel policy is to limit access to a maximum of 8 users for most custom channels unless the content publisher has an agreement with AvantGo. Please attempt to re-subscribe to the custom channel through our website after February 20 to be one of 8 users who continues to receive the custom channel content. If you find that you can no longer subscribe to your favorite custom channel, please email the content publisher at their support email address and let them know you would like to access their content through AvantGo."
Why is this happening you might ask? Here's why:
AvantGo sells middleware solutions - they have servers that they want to sell to your big company. These servers dish out your corporate content in a mobile device friendly fashion. This is one way that AvantGo makes money - this server solution is likely $10K plus. The other way that AvantGo makes money is by offering companies like Rolling Stone the ability to push out news & ads to customers. Rolling Stone gets listed in the official AvantGo channels list, people click to add the channel, and Rolling Stone gets to extend their branding. For a while, Pocket PC Thoughts was listed in the official AvantGo channel list as well.
Why aren't we listed there any more?
Buried deep in the fine print of the AvantGo partner sign up process is a little gem that states the following: it's free to be a channel partner until you hit 5000 subscribers. Once you hit 5000 subscribers, you as the partner have to pay $5000 US plus a certain amount per subscriber beyond 5000 (when they sent me the bill I believe it was 20 cents per subscriber). When AvantGo presented me with a bill for $6000 US, I had no choice but to say "pull my official channel from your site". The other Pocket PC web sites you see listed in their official channel list are either too small (under 5000) to get hit with this charge, or they've made a special agreement with AvantGo (like Smaller.com did way back when). So what happened when AvantGo pulled my site from their channel listing? All subscribers got a "Site not found" error in AvantGo.
You, being the smart readers you are, then switched to the "custom channel" option in AvantGo where you could point AvantGo to any web site and say "make this content available for me on my Pocket PC". I estimate there's around 8000 of you who did this with Pocket PC Thoughts, and I'm sure I'm not the only site that has smart readers. AvantGo finally had enough of this, and they're banner any custom channel with more than eight users on it.
Bottom line: in 48 hours it will be impossible for you to use AvantGo to read this web site.
The solution? Mazingo. Despite it's quirks and rough edges, Mazingo is the best solution for getting this site onto your device.
Here's a further explanation from AvantGo as to why they're doing this:
"Just as these organizations pay their ISPs to host their website content and their dial-up or TCP/IP providers to deliver business e-mail, AvantGo is now asking that Custom Channel providers with more than eight subscribers to help support the cost of delivering a mobile version of their content and/or applications to those users."
I don't begrudge AvantGo wanting to make money and stay in business. But for a site like mine, their "service" is pointless. The opening page of this site is designed to fit onto a Pocket PC screen. It doesn't need any "middleware tweaking". In fact, AvantGo has consistently ticked me off by messing with the HTML code and creating weird spacing where none should exist. They don't even support transparent GIFs! Mazingo has the right concept: the "pulling" is done by the local PC with local bandwidth, not by some server.
And there you have it. Remember we're still working on getting a new template up and running that will make the discussion forums look good on a Pocket PC. Until that happens, those of you doing mobile sync should stick to the "lite" version of the Mazingo channel.
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02-18-2002, 08:49 AM
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Mystic
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 1,768
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too bad
I can understand the logic... but they should reconsider their business model. They are seeking money from the wrong side IMO.
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02-18-2002, 09:01 AM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 99
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Great for Mazingo
Great news for Mazingo  . AvantGo is going to lose a lot of webmaster interest with this announcement.
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02-18-2002, 09:03 AM
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Sage
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 792
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I saw on the PDAbuzz message boards about an AvantGo shutdown, but didn't read the post because I didn't think it was really about something at AvantGo literally shutdown just a problem or something. This is really a big deal (which I am sure you realize) simply because a lot of people use AvantGo because it was included with their device, and use the custome channels. We have been seeing a lot of ads lately (atleast i have) on AvantGo, so I though they must be making some money off us.
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02-18-2002, 10:24 AM
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Pupil
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 36
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God Bye AvantGo
This was the last drop!!
I am quitting ALL my avantgo subscriptions as of today.
Why didnt Microsoft make a working version of Windows CE channels instead of supporting this crap company.
Well I will adwise all my customers to stay away from avantgo.
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02-18-2002, 10:55 AM
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Pupil
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 11
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God Bye AvantGo
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Bruno
Why didnt Microsoft make a working version of Windows CE channels instead of supporting this crap company.
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I agree wholeheartedly! If Mobile Favourites actually worked properly there would be much less need for AvantGo and Mazingo. Lets hope iSilo gets ported from the Palm sooner rather than later.
JF
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02-18-2002, 11:24 AM
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Thinker
Join Date: Oct 2004
Posts: 318
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I see the reasoning behind this. I'm kind of confused as why Avantgo have gone down the advertising or pay for the content providers.
Why not offer a subscribtion model for the end users? Doesn't really make that much sense to the individual does it. I guess once they've got a foot in the door with a corp they perhaps figure they can offer more products to them.
I'd quite happily pay a sub fee to have custom channels enabled. Not much but certainly the speed of Avantgo would make me more willing to pay a sub fee than it does with Mazingo.
Still Mazingo is a very fine product the only problem is that it's only as quick as your Internet Interconnects are.
Regards,
Daniel
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02-18-2002, 11:36 AM
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Sage
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 734
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This sucks damnit! Will Mazingo support our custom channels? I sure hope so because I have some Kick Ass customs i'd hate to lose because of this crap.
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02-18-2002, 12:14 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 332
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I would also pay a small monthly subscription to have this enabled.
I just wish Mazingo integrated with ActiveSync instead of being a separate app. It would also be cool if they added their own link to IE and totally replaced AvantGo.
I think I'll dich my account too.
daniel
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02-18-2002, 12:56 PM
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Philosopher
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 513
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Mazingo's custom channels are IMHO still missing one feature -- the ability to restrict downloading of off-site pages. This makes a huge difference for some sites. I'd emailed Bill Dettering and he said this is in the works but gave no ETA (though I'm always impressed by Bill's prompt, personal customer service to individuals).
My email mentioned slashdot.org as an example. The predefined channel often doesn't work 100% for me, it often fails (to varying degrees) to pull in all the pages it should. Sometimes I get 2 pages deep of news blurbs, sometimes 3, sometimes 4, and the individual top ten comments for each blurb aren't always there (it's like 50-50 crapshoot). Normally, when a link isn't supposed to be downloaded, if you click on it Mazingo will pop up a message asking if you want to go online in PIE and access the page. But these links that I'm talking about don't do anything when I click on them, which isn't normal behavior. So I'm not sure if Mazingo really didn't download them, or if they are there already and it's simply a problem with the PPC viewer trying to access them...?
Truthfully this prolly isn't Mazingo's fault and may be a problem from the site itself. But I'm just not sure how Mazingo's predefined channels are configured (anybody know?). So I tried pulling in slashdot as a custom channel to see if it would be more reliable. Unfortunately I forgot that slashdot's news blurbs are very liberally sprinkled with off-site links. So with a custom channel of link depth 4, the channel size grew to something like 8MB+ (it may have stopped prematurely). I had also tried a link depth of 6 (which doesn't seem to be officially supported but works for now), and it filled my CF card up to 120MB+ before it ran out of space 
BTW, a ZDNet review of Mazingo liked the service but also wanted to see it integrated into ActiveSync and PIE in the future. While it sounds like a good idea, I'm not sure Mazingo will do it at this point since they've seemed to put in *a lot* of work into fixing/optimizing their proprietary desktop sync applet and PPC viewer.
P.S. Luckily I don't have any AvantGo custom channels set up so this announcement won't affect me much
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