The First Review: NewsGator

Over the past few days as I was doing research on RSS Readers I found several posts by Bloggers, news agencies, company public relations, that due to a mature and declining market the era of the RSS Reader had ended. Turns out that ended nearly 2 years ago as that is when Pluck shuttered their consumer web RSS Reader. Who knew that this was a dead market! The major threat of the time……web browsers and email clients that were planning to integrate RSS Readers into their software. I was shocked to find out how late to the party I actually am! Undaunted by these dooms day postings; I did a quick Google search and quickly found that many RSS readers still exist today. Lucky for me (and you if you are reading this) I will have plenty of fodder for my reviews.

In the end my search yielded several true RSS Readers, some social networking bookmarkers, and something called a newsroll. I assume that is like a Blogroll, but I will explore it in future posts. After a cursory review of each of the services that the search placed in front of me I decided to begin the reviews with a somewhat well known and seemingly aggressively named serves call NewsGator. Over the next several posts I will be reviewing the plethora of tools and services that the team at NewsGator have put together to take all the work out of finding information on the internet that you might routinely search for. Namely news items, blog postings, commercial advertising (sales at your favorite department store), school event updates, basically anything on the internet that has a regular distribution of information through RSS Feeds.

NewsGator has a multilayer approach to its offerings. First there is a downloadable desktop application called FeedDemon. For the most part it looks a lot like one of the major email clients available (Outlook, Entourage, or Thunderbird), the difference is that it only houses your feeds. It has a folder tree on the left like an email account and the folders can be created to help you sort and access your feeds in the way that suits you best. It also has a second section that is all about keeping the feeds that you want to save for later, called Clippings. The third part of this section is called Watches. I have not played with this too much yet, but at first glance it looks like it is to create your own personalized feed service. I will delve more into FeedDemon in future postings.

The next service that NewsGator offers is NewsGator Online. As the name implies this service is an internet based service. You have a secure login which gives you access to your feeds in a similar fashion as FeedDemon. The look and the feel is very close to that of the downloadable application. The last of the tools that I have started to look at is NewsGator Inbox. This is a downloadable plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. I am not sure yet if it will work with the other email clients as well, but I will let you know what I find out! NewsGator Inbox allows you to receive your RSS Feeds directly within Outlook. You can even navigate to the originating web page without leaving outlook, it utilizes your internet explore settings in order to accomplish most of its internet tasks.

For me the best part (so far) about all three of these tools is that they automatically synchronize across all of the platforms. So if I am in Outlook and I make a change within the NewsGator folder, it flows seamlessly into the online version of into FeedDemon and is ready and available the next time that I open any of the tools. It is pretty ingenious if you ask me.