Newsgator manages 396 RSS feeds for me. I have been using Newsgator Outlook Edition from back when it was the only product they had, at least a couple years now. I had always been happy with my workflow with this setup, I was able to set up Outlook search folders to group things in clever ways and streamline my reading. Everything was neatly searchable, flags and categories worked across email and RSS, fantastic. However, with the aforementioned issues with Outlook 2007 beta, plus a couple of new ones involving our ancient corporate proxy servers, it was taking me too long to make my daily rounds of feed reading.
So again, in a temporary/interim solution fix, I went ahead and downloaded FeedDemon, which is now integrated with Newsgator’s online synchronization engine and I was already licensed for it.
I’m really happy I did. My workflow (daily reading) is so much faster now — so much faster. The client itself is lighting fast. There are five different reading “styles”, and once you’ve done the work of assigning particular styles to specific feeds and/or folders of feeds, the time it takes to scan “scannable” feeds just plummets.
The feed read status synchronization across machines is near perfect for me. Caveat: I only keep on instance of the application open across my three machines at any given time, I don’t know what happens if they are all still running, but from things I’ve seen in the forums this is less than recommended. It was almost a deal breaker that nothing besides the feed data itself is synced, but this is to be expected because the program was designed and built before it had been acquired by NewsGator and I understand that work is underway to sync settings and especially the saved articles called “news bins”. I’m having trouble also figuring out how to expose the data to a desktop search tool, something I’m really missing right now.
It has changed my behavior too, I hate to say it, but if your blog isn’t on my “must read” list and it doesn’t have any pictures, I’m much less likely to read it word for word. And people, if you feed is partial text I’m going to email you, ask for full text, give it a week and unsubscribe.