The news today from Nick Bradbury, the developer of the FeedDemon desktop RSS aggregator for Windows …
… that his company Bradsoft has been acquired by NewsGator is a significant move in the market for tools and applications that enable you to more easily and effectively retrieve, manage and use information.
NewsGator enables you to subscribe to RSS feeds through its online aggregator services, or via email and into Microsoft Outlook. It does not have a desktop RSS aggregator.
With FeedDemon – arguably the leading such application for Windows – NewsGator will be able to address a more complete market opportunity through providing the tools for people to manage their information both online as well as on the desktop with a stand-alone application.
Not only that, FeedDemon will integrate closely with NewsGator’s online synchronization platform. This means that you can use FeedDemon on multiple computers and keep all your RSS content synchronized between them and your online RSS content, a feature FeedDemon already offers with the Bloglines web-based RSS aggregator (Bloglines, incidentally, was acquired by Ask Jeeves in February).
As Nick explains it further:
[…] Beyond that, having a server-side piece offers a lot of interesting possibilities. Coupling a rich desktop client with a first-rate server-side aggregator provides the best of both worlds: you get the power of a Windows application and all the flexibility of a web-based approach. There have been a number of features I’ve been wanting to add to FeedDemon that required a server-side piece which I can now provide.
While these changes won’t happen overnight, we’ve already been working hard on a new release of FeedDemon – version 1.51 – which will include much better integration than currently exists. You should expect to see the first beta of FeedDemon 1.51 a couple of weeks from now.
Read the formal announcement in NewsGator’s press release.
As for existing FeedDemon customers (I’m one), Nick’s post contained some great news:
I think you’re going to like this 🙂 NewsGator uses a subscription model, and FeedDemon will become part of their subscription plans. All existing FeedDemon customers will get a two-year business standard subscription for free – and this includes upgrades to FeedDemon. In other words, if you’ve already bought FeedDemon, you’ll get brand new versions of FeedDemon and a subscription to NewsGator Online free for the next two years.
Now that’s a sweet deal!
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
