Newsgator a good choice for RSS reader

Frank Gruber wrote a good review, published on TechCrunch,  of the current state of online feed readers. This review covered just the online web based readers, not the client applications. Newsgator and some others offer both a web based reader and a client based reader. I use Newsgator Inbox which is integrated with Microsoft Outlook, which of course is client based.

Here is a list of the RSS readers reviewed in the story. Frank concludes that Bloglines and Rojo are the richest in features.

  Examining traffic to my blog, the most popular readers are Bloglines (29%), Newsgator (13%), RSS Bandit (7%), MyYahoo (5%), SharpReader (5%), FeedDemon (4%), and the balance spread among a dozen or so different readers.

If you haven't tried an RSS reader I would strongly encourage you to try one of these. If you use Outlook for your email Newsgator Inbox is a great choice.

Comments

[Easton Ellsworth]

I'm a big NewsGator Online fan, and I use it to get through over 300 feeds every day. I'm going to try the new FeedDemon to see how it works speed-wise. Bloglines is definitely still the most popular choice, and I do like it. But I find Newsgator to be the best combination of speed and versatility.

[Todd]

Don, I have to disagree on Newsgator. After reading your post I just spent >30 minutes futzing with it and ended up uninstalling it. Outlook hung three times (each time I opened help in Newsgator) and finally suggested I disable the Newsgator plugin.

My main frustration was figuring out how to import my OPML file. Finally I imported the OPML to their website then told the Newsgator client to synchronize, but it never did despite several restarts of Outlook.

I'm not sure if overloading Outlook with RSS feeds is the best approach. Although Sharpreader has some definitely drawbacks, it's lean and mean and works well for me. I like Outlook for mail but I've found it becomes increasingly unstable with a ton of plugins.

[Olivier Ezratty]

I'm surprised by the slow pace of evolution of RSS readers. Not much user-friendly features have been added in the last years for those top 5 readers. I happen to use SharpReader which is lean and fast but contains some GPF generating bugs that have not been fixed for a while. For example, has any RSS reader got a cache feature, caching all RSS HTML pages on your desktop to speed up scanning it? Any other sharing status data on a Web server so that it can be shared across several devices?

[Dharmesh Shah]

I have to put in a vote for OnFolio (client-based). Its a great, well-designed RSS reader -- and the company (founded by one of the Allaire brothers) was recently acquired by Microsoft...