July 15th, 2006
How do you like your RSS?
JupiterResearch’s Michael Gartenberg asks a great question: do you prefer a "river of news" presentation of RSS or a more structured presentation like the one delivered by NewsGator Inbox in Outlook? If you had asked me that question at any time through last week, I would have replied that NewsGator Inbox was my preference. I’ve been using it for years and have always enjoyed the advantages of having my RSS subscriptions integrated into the Outlook environment.
But for the last couple of weeks, I have been rediscovering the joys of using FeedDemon. Because I’m trying to keep my Outlook 2007 environment "pure" while I’m working on my book and have now installed it on my production machine, NewsGator Inbox was not an option at this time. Because I have been a very satisfied NewsGator subscriber for years, I remembered I could install FeedDemon and use it as a benefit of my NewsGator Online subscription. I’ve been a big fan of Nick Bradbury and FeedDemon for a long time (my former company’s SecureCRT product lost to FeedDemon in the SIIA Codie Awards two years ago and I told Nick at the time that there was no product I was happier to lose to).
FeedDemon lets me choose how I want to consume RSS. I can do the structured folder thing very nicely. I can flag items I want to read at a later time and recall them. I can use News Bins to collect research related to a topic I plan to write about. And I can do the "river of news" thing when I want to. And my subscriptions are always synchronized with my NewsGator Online account so when I want to do a quick check on feeds while out and about, I never see something on my Treo 650 that I’ve already read on my PC - unless I want to.
If it’s been a while since you looked at FeedDemon, I’s suggest you might want to get reacquainted with this excellent aggregator and reader.
UPDATE: I hadn’t seen Scoble’s post on the same topic until just now (I’ve been essentially offline for a couple of days and am just now catching up on my feeds). I know Robert has been a big fan of NewsGator as well. Looks like he still is.
Marc Orchant has been building, testing, and sometimes breaking hardware and software for 25 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
