A NewsGator System Review
February 13th, 2008
Newsgator has released all of it’s individual products for free. This was quite a surprise as they were/are among the leading desktop applications for reading RSS feeds for both Macs and Windows computers. However, they explained clearly that most of their money is being made from business licenses, so the more individual desktops they can control, the likelier their products will be chosen when the corporation starts looking for an overall solution. Also, they’ll be collecting “attention data.”
If there is a specific feed you love, and you’re constantly emailing its articles to friends or saving articles in your clippings, that’s interesting…and if there are a lot of people doing this, it’s probably a good indicator about the “relevancy” of that content for other users. Similar with individual articles that are getting a lot of attention from users. Basically, by using your data, in combination with aggregate data from other users, we can deliver a better experience for everyone. And that’s a good thing - both for us and for you.
Greg Reinacker
Sounds like Google’s relevancy algorithm.
In addition to the desktop software, they’ve also given free access to the web-based service (NewsGator Online) and the mobile service (NewsGator Go! & HTML mobile reader), all of which sync to each other so that a feed added to or read on one is automatically updated on the others.
NetNewsWire
I started by exporting my list of feeds from my current feed reader Google Reader, and importing it into NetNewsWire, the Mac desktop software. The import went well and I spent quite a while reorganizing my feeds (It seems there is no folder tag in the standard so this happens every time I change readers.).
The software itself is a joy to use, very intuitive with keyboard shortcuts for those of us who feel more efficient using them and fairly extensive preferences for customization. Along with the normal options to flag, email and open the item in a browser are a link to the desktop editor of the user’s choice for heavy bloggers and plenty of social web options. Though with the exception of flagging, all of these operations require immediate Internet access. There is no setting it up to be done later as you might wish on an airplane.
NewsGator Online
On quitting or exiting the program it synchs it’s settings with the online and the mobile reader. Here I was disappointed to see that all the careful organizational work I had done in the desktop client hadn’t been transferred over. I know many people don’t bother using folders but I do use it extensively to help triage the information coming through my 370 subscriptions. I understood why my folders were lost moving from one system to another but shouldn’t two products from the same company be able to cooperate? It makes me doubt how well other changes I make in one or the other will synch across the network which is supposed to be its strength.
Then there’s the online service itself, I expected something comparable to the desktop software on the web, in actuality it’s very stripped down and the lack of AJAX support after Google Reader makes feel terribly slow. Far too painful to try to use even for one session with the number of items I deal with and expect to get through quickly. Others who track fewer websites or those who publish less frequently (or both) will find the reload speed far more manageable. It is interesting to note that while the web clippings synch, the flags do not. There is a cool trick where you can right click on a feed or folder and act on them (such as unsubscribing or marking all read) without having to load them first.
HTML mobile reader
The HTML reader is very stripped down as you’d expect from something meant to be loaded on mobile devices. It makes for easy navigation and (relatively) fast loading. There’s reading and that’s all. If you want to do something else with a feed item (e.g. delicious or blog it), then don’t mark it read and go back to it later.
Overall it’s a good system for people who work on their own computers or mobile devices the vast majority of the time. Those who need a good web-based interface might do better with Google Reader or Bloglines.
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Technology.
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