The full headline reads “NewsGator Technologies Acquires FeedDemon; Acquisition of FeedDemon and TopStyle Strengthens NewsGator’s RSS Platform; Nick Bradbury Joins NewsGator Team” — can’t believe I missed this news (press release). I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d been subscribed to either Nick Bradbury‘s or Greg Reinacker‘s blogs — now I am.
I’m not a user of NewsGator nor FeedDemon — instead, I just use Bloglines — but it’s still interesting. If Bloglines offered RSS syndication of your Bloglines subscriptions (your own personalized RSS feed containing all the aggregated entries from all your subscribed feeds), then using Bloglines with something like Mozilla Thunderbird’s (really lame) RSS aggregator support would be just as useful, to me, as the NewsGator/FeedDemon offering.
Programmer, husband, father, singer, guitarist, tinkerer, reverse engineer, strange, and living in New Jersey. 
Dear my friend, Feeddemon is dead after it was bought by newsgator. It is a nwsgator online subscription server based appendage.
We consumer need to show some point. Not just simply let those corporations does whatever they want. They have the captial, They can buy feeddmon. For me its like I bought feeddemon I bought the house and I own the house. I am the landlord. Suddently after newsgator bought the house, feeddemon goes activated by paid newsgator online account instead of the key number I bought. I became a tenant not a landlord in my own housefeeddemon. Cause the upgrade policy is that I can have all the feeddemon minor upgrade untill 2.0 version. Now, everytime I reinstall feeddemon I need a paid-online newsgator account to activate it. Its a monthly bill also.
Hi my friend,I want to tell you something about nicks promising is a lie:
feeddemon wont work after your subscribtion runs out.
To prove this point, I already did a experiment. I used my credit card to updgrade my account to business standard. Then I installd feeddemon 1.6beta fine when I activated it with my business standard account.
Then I canceled my subscribition in the trail period, tried to reinstall my whole system including windows and feeddemon 1.6beta. Again feeddemon needed me to put my account to active it. But this time it wasnt activated. Cause my account wasnt a paid account anymore.
So nick is lieing about once you own feeddemon, you own it forever.
If you dont reinstall your windows, off course feeddemon will be fine even after your subscription runs out. But who can guarantee you wont need to reinstall your windows. For exemple, you system is scrwed up by virus and then you need to reinstall your whole system, then again you wont be able to activate without a paid newsgator account. Since newsgator server cant tell the diffrence between ex-paid customer and never-paid customer.
So I can’t protect my investment on the feeddemon againast all oods!
Answering me, my dear listening frind.
I spend two hours to reinstall my system and just want to prove nicks promise and protect myself own and the rest hardcore feeddemons fans invesment on a piece of software we used to like so much.
The fact is that:
Why you put yourself into this unpredicatable pain.
Feeddemon already died as a stand alone news reader. Cause its gonna be newsgator paid services add-on. Newsgator is not a software company. They sell the service. Ridiculously the service is about that you need to pay to see your feeds even when feeds is everywhere these days.
They bought feeddemon. They aint plan to sell the feeddemon software but to kill feeddemon market. Its like if you wanna use feeddemon after this you are gonna paid for newsgators feeds subscibing service. If you wont paid for it, you wont see your feeds synchronized anymore.
This is exactly pain in the ass. They rent the software to you to let you see the feeds you paid for but you can read somewhere else for free?
Is this logical?
So if you dont want to rent the software for ever and never own it, its time to leave feeddemon now. Its soon or later. Cause they dont even use serial number to activate product anymore. You need to use your paid online newsgator account to activate it. So nicks post about rethinking is a lie. You dont have a paid account, you wont able to activate feeddemon after you subscribition expires. Cause you dont have a paid newsgator account anymore. If your computer screws up one day, you need to reinstall your whole system including feeddemon but you wont be able to activate it in that period of time without a paid newsgator online account.
What you gonna do then? Or other situations similar like this.
Its time to screw up feeddemon as a stand alone newsgator for now. Cause its core is rotten now. Its not a software anymore. Its a door in the desktop environment you need to pay to pass to see the feeds free everywhere else just like newsgator outlook edition is not a software anymore but a door in the outlook environment you need to pay to pass to see the feeds free everywhere else.
This is newsgators plan: kill you free pass in the desktop via feeddemon to news and rss and free pass in the outlook environment via outlook newsgator addon. Instead they build up two doors for you to rent to pass. At the end, news and rss is not free anymore. You need to pay to see it.
Feeddemon is dead as a software. Its a server based appendage like newsgator outlook version, its like you need to pay to receive hotmail via outlook. But outlook still allow you to receive other email service like yahoo, feeddemon is newsgator server based only and wont allow you to use any other service other than newsgator.monopoly.
Its time for some other news aggregators to take over the empty space left by feeddemon and newgator in desktop and outlook news aggregator market.
Here they rise:Greatnews,intraVnews ,blogbot,rssowl,Awasu,Attensa!
Check out greatnews man(http://www.curiostudio.com/).
Theres 4 major reasons why I love it:
1. It synchronizes with bloglins. Folder hierarchy is synchronized between Bloglines and Greatnews as well. you feel really comfortable to organize your feeds. You know how it sucks for feeddemon to synchronize with bloglines. Cause feeddemon only imports opml from bloglines without Folder hierarchy at all. So its a very hard for me to find a specfic feed and to organize those feeds. In all the desktop news clients, Greatnewss synchronization with bloglines leaves rest news aggregators in dust. Its like use outlook express to receive hotmail. Once you receive all the news from bloglines server in greatnews, all the news will be flagged read on bloglines online edition.If you love bloglines, you feel at home.
2. Its extremely small. It only takes 800kb or so to install. You can even install it on a usb flash drive or even a floppy disk. So you take it everywhere to connect to Pc to use it. How cool is that?! Its like you have yourself own mini newsgator server which can gurantee you wont read the same news twice.
3. It runs with only a tiny memory and cpu engaged. So you wont even notice it when it updates news in the background.
Above all its free.
There are still some sweet points about greatnews I can tell you below just in case you can put a relevant review in your website to let more people to be aware of a sweet piece of software, to less their pain of losing feeddemon.Here we go:
* 100% Unicode support. Displays international languages on the same page. Use any languages anywhere in GreatNews, including Search, Label and News watch. Like I read japanese news to do a research, greatnews displays all these south asian news so well including japanese, Chinese, whatevernese. Feeddemon cant do this . As far as I know, feeddemon cant support hebrew news,japanese news, and chinese news well.
** Full text search with keyword highlights. Its very productive when you consider get things done.
* Integrated internet browser, with popup blocking. Working closely with default browser like Firefox. A kill point to please firefox fan.
* Channel Organizer helps organize channel subscriptions in one place. Use Find Channel to locate your subscriptions quickly. Again a great get things done tool.
* With Import/Export wizard, you can import/export all channel subscriptions in a single step.
* Export rss articles to rss 2.0 format. You can also customize the export by selecting channel/group/label, and/or applying filters.
*you can use search channel to keep eyes on special subject like Ipod, Like using feeddemons search channel and newsgators smart feeds. The difference is that smart feeds isnt free but greatnews is.
Its a such a sweet software. Even its roughly half an year old with its debut in 02/18/2005. Very promising. We wont miss feeddemon that much.
The developers makes such a blowing software to offer it to the world free. I think as a strong believer in good software and unbeliever in subscription-based software, we should offer a little help to these generous and talented dudes.Im a hugh fan of your The Great Software List. We can spread the words. Just like in the explorer, we spread firefox. In the Rss world, we should spread software like greatnews against newsgator evil software subscribtion model.
Greatnews is a very strong desktop newsreader. Even On the server side, it has a strong bloglins synchronization api even when you say this api is not perfect, but at least its free and still improved. It can compete newsgator in two categories: on the desktop news aggregator environment, and on the server api category which is a very strong api supported by bloglines. Its like you can use outlook express to receive hotmail without going hotmail plus.
Such a promising and helpful software shouldnt die without our support. If thats the plan, we will have no place to turn to but evil subscribtion like newsgator since they already bought the so-called best desktop news agregator feeddeon. I always remembr that day as a sad day and a betray when nick gave up hard-core feeddemon fans like me to surrender to newsgator corporate money promising future. Since then, the destiny child of desktop news aggregator market died!
I am not doing any favor for any other newsgators. Its newsgator itself kill their market. Nick broke his hardcore fanss heart. I was feeling homeless in Rss World Once I test feeddemon 1.6 beta. I once own my house, now I rent it. I am homeless. I want to own my house. Thats why I start looking.
The way we leave a disapointed business is the way we customer show those greedy corporation our point. Their intension is maximumizing their profit. Like newsgator, instead of selling software, they rent them. They are the landdord, we arent. They are very smart to explain how cheap the new subcription model is. It sounds like they are charity. We arent idiot. We all know that it requires more money to buy a house rather than rent a house in a short term. But in the long run, we lose money when we keep renting house. Landdord is always the winner.
Microsoft charge you when you receive your hotmail via outlook, but you still can choose not to,cause there are some very other nice email service you can use with outlook. Newsgator dont even give you a choice. This is a big ignorance to customers needs. Imagine one day microsoft start activate windows with a pre-paid microsoft passport account. I tell you what. I am gonna be the first one to jump on apples ship. But microsoft are smart enought not to destroy themself like that. Obviously newsgator cant see the point. They are too eager to maxmumizing their profit as a pretending-to-be-kind landlord. Too greedy to not hurt customers heart.
Leave them let them feel pain. If they see us gone and lose the money theyre supposed to make. They maybe appoligize for their mistake and correct it. Untill that day, its time to say bye-bye.
Newsgator listen, don’t try to put your hands in my pocket forever. A monthly bill? I am not loving it.
Thanks for the passionate comment.
GreatNews looks promising, especially it’s claim to support Bloglines.com synchronization. I might have to try and install it and see how it runs.
I still think the best solution would be a IMAP server whose data store is your Bloglines subscriptions, kept in sync via the Bloglines Sync API. This way, the desktop application isn’t tied to a single platform — GreatNews and many other desktop RSS aggregators are Win32 only — and there’s no lock-in, since you can switch to using any IMAP-capable mail client.