All the buzz today in our little world of RSS aggregators is around NewsGator’s acquisition of Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon (and TopStyle).
This actually comes at an interesting time for me as I evaluate which aggregator to use. For the longest while I was a NewsGator Outlook plug-in devotee – it just seemed to make sense to use Outlook as my one stop information console. Plus it gave me the real nice ability to just fwd via email some posts with links to people who might be interested, and also to create a “Blog This!” folder in Outlook for posts I wanted to commment on, but didn’t have time right then.
Two things happened which forced a changed:
First, my Tablet had a meltdown, and NG Outlook has never been the same. Despite some heroic tech support from the NG team (big kudos to those guys if you’re reading), something funky was going on with my laptop and NG Outlook never again worked. I gave up a few weeks back – who can devote that much time to installing a time-saving tool? I’ve been using an odd combo of NG Online and Feedreader (for internal company blogs), but as productivity tools they just didn’t match up.
Second, I bought a Mac Powerbook for home use. I love blogging on that thing, and catching up on all the latest posts, but NG had no usable client-side aggregator for the Mac. So I grabbed NetNewsWire Lite, which is a slick little tool. However there was no way to synch the feeds with my work system, so I was also a bit off – which feeds I had, which ones were read, etc.
With the announcement today about NG and FeedDemon, I decided to give FD a whirl at work. I’m sold. It’s everything I wanted in an RSS agg client. The News Bins feature is just perfect for collecting “Blog This” posts. Still playing around with Watches, and I haven’t yet really figured out how the Newsgator synching works, but that at least looks promising, especially with the recent news. And as a client rather than Web-based aggregator, I can subscribe to feeds inside our corporate firewall, which is critical.
So Nick (or now Greg), you’ll be getting some of my money soon.
Now – can you PLEASE come up with a Mac client version that I can synch with my work WinXP Tablet client via NG Online Services? I would pay extra, and do a small dance of joy in your honor.
