FeedDemon has been the best RSS news reading application on the Windows platform for a long time. The folks at NewsGator certainly thought so, and instead of building their own standalone news aggregator for Windows, they bought FeedDemon. The best news is that though FeedDemon was at one time a commercial product (and worth every penny), it's now available for free.

Even when it was a standalone application FeedDemon got news reading right. The user interface is easy to interact with, and the application is solid. But now that it is a client for NewsGator's web application, it has gained another whole level of usefulness. FeedDemon synchronizes with your NewsGator account giving you the ability to keep your feeds in sync between it, your NewsGator web account, and any other clients you choose to use from NewsGator, including ones for most mobile phones, and even Macs.

How many of you subscribe to an RSS feed because you liked one post you read? Raise your hands please. No, seriously, raise your hands please. Now how many of you stay subscribed to that feed because you're either too lazy to unsubscribe, don't know how to unsubscribe, or don't want to hurt the bloggers' feelings by unsubscribing? Us too.

NewsGator is coming to our rescue!

Starting today, NewsGator, NetNewsWire, and FeedDemon will start recommending stories and feeds for you to read and subscribe to.

Using some Harry Potter magic sauce from a company called SenseArray, NewsGator will start showing you suggestions based on things that other people think are interesting. Hooray!

What's the catch? Well, to make this technology smarter, you'll have to interact with your feeds a little. That's OK. We know that the earth isn't run by Terminators machines...yet. Right now, SenseArray's technology uses forward and share numbers, as well as tags and comment data to calculate what might interest you. You'll be able to thumbs up and thumbs down stories to customize the experience though, so no worries. Rage against the machine, y'all!

Soon, NewsGator hopes to accurately predict your tastes, even before you know what your tastes are.

It looks like the company is also hoping to help us deal with our severe information overload (the 3% of us junkies) by letting us unsubscribe to those dormant feeds that we don't like anymore and keep us up to date with the Right Stuff. The stuff we'll actually, you know...read?

Oh, and no worries, it's not just for the geeks. Their new recommendation service will cover Top News, Entertainment, Sports, Fun Stuff, Science and Technology. While we're not sure what "Fun Stuff" actually is, we'll wait for T2 to suggest something.

Oh and please feel free to subscribe to the Downloadsquad feed. We're humans.

NewsGator has released an updated version of FeedDemon, the company's desktop RSS reader for Windows. FeedDemon 2.7 features a ton of bug fixes, a handful of new features, and best of all, it's still free. NewsGator used to charge for its desktop reader, but starting with FeedDemon 2.6 and NetNewsWire 3.1 for Mac the company started offering desktop clients for free.

Here are just a few of the changes in FeedDemon 2.7:

• Quicker navigation of the subscription tree
• Subscribe to multiple feeds at once from the "find feeds" menu
• Copy a multi-line URL into the address bar and it will be shortened to one line
• Support for multiple enclosures in a single post

Note that the FeedDemon home page still says the latest version is 2.6. But if you click the download link you should get FeedDemon 2.7.

[via Digital Inspiration]

How many of the applications you use on a daily basis are web-based as opposed to locally installed native applications? For me, the answer is way more than I ever would have expected.

Had you asked me this question a few years ago, I would have vehemently denied that the future of development is on the web. As much as I could see and understand the value of a ubiquitously available web-based application, there's just no way to approach the level of power and integration (not to mention the ability to be always-available) that is possible with well conceived and developed desktop software.

Of course, back then I didn't imagine that web applications could become as useful as Google Calendar or Remember the Milk. I also didn't imagine that light - yet still useful - versions of these apps would be available from my mobile phone almost wherever I was.

In fact, and much to my surprise, today most of my personal data today is tied up in online services: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Backpack, Remember the Milk, Facebook, Newsgator, and Evernote to name just a few.

Most of these are probably pretty familiar names, but one is a newcomer in the web space: Evernote. Still in beta, the new version of Evernote contains a full-featured web version, but synchronizes seamlessly with desktop software on either Windows or Mac platforms. And it's a breath of fresh air.

NewsGator, the Denver based company behind ever-popular RSS readers such as NetNewsWire for Mac and FeedDemon for Windows, announced updates for these award-winning products. The full list of the updated products include FeedDemon 2.6 (for Windows), NetNewsWire 3.1 (for the Mac), NewsGator Go! (for mobile platforms), and Inbox (a Microsoft Outlook plug-in). According to NewsGator, users will see improvements in peformance, usability, and relavance improvements.

The second part of NewsGator's announcment is the most exciting - all these products are available for free! Yes, you read that correctly - start downloading away.

NewsGator products' built-in selling point their ability to sync with Newsgator's internet based servers. That is, if you use NetNewsWire at home and FeedDemon at work, you won't have duplicate items to read between the two applications.

Why did NewsGator set these products free? They are obviously shifting gears add corporate resources to monetize their Enterprise offerings such as the NewsGator Enterprise Server. NewsGator wants to take the success they've enjoyed in the consumer market and apply it to the Enterprise environment.

These days it seems like the whole world has shifted over to web-based RSS aggregators like Google Reader and Bloglines. If you're a holdout and prefer to use a Windows desktop application reader, you might be pleased to note that NewsGator's FeedDemon has recently had an update to version 2.5. FeedDemon is widely accepted as the best Windows-based offline reader, and the only reason that it doesn't kill the competition is that it is a commercial product, whereas it is competing against a host of free alternatives.

Anyhow, there are a lot of people that use FeedDemon and those users can now take advantage of the new features that have been added to it, like better support for offline reading and a very well conceptualized Popular Topics report.

The new offline reading functionality gives users the ability to prefetch unread items, which will store not only all images in unread posts, but a configurable number of linked pages. While this process can take awhile, it gives you what is essentially a full-featured feed reading and browsing experience while offline. Good stuff.

The new Popular Topics page lets you see at a glance which topics are being linked to and commented upon often amongst the feeds that you are subscribed to, with a callout that shows what is most popular amongst all of NewsGator Online's users. Great stuff.

For similar functionality on a Mac, check out NetNewsWire, also owned by NewsGator.

FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are undoubtedly top-notch products, and ones that we have used regularly in the past. Unfortunately, they may be some of the best and last in a dying breed of software; with the recent addition of offline browsing functionality to Google Reader, there is one less reason not to simply consume your feeds in a browser. Working in a browser for feed reading adds the advantage of not needing to switch contexts from feed reader to browser, or work with an under-powered built-in browser in an offline reader. Since you're dealing with web content, what better place to do so than in a browser?

Today's release of FeedDemon 2.1 beta seemed like a nice little treat. After the release of NewsGator Go! last week, it felt like a really solid one-two punch from NewsGator. Right on!

But then as I'm using the new version of FeedDemon, I find updates notifying me of minor (but pretty wonderful from a usability perspective) updates to Bloglines, and the Google Reader update that David already walked us through. Holy cow! Since we already know what's up with Google Reader, let's go back and have a look at the updates to Bloglines and FeedDemon.

Bloglines
Bloglines have given a very nice overhaul to the feed list on the left hand side, adding some carefully done Ajaxy goodness, like yellow fades for unread count updates. There is also a subtle notification of the number of new unread items as you obsessively press the R hotkey to refresh your sidebar. Feed list updates occur more often. All in all Bloglines feels snappier than before, although that could just be the excitement of new features talking.

FeedDemon
FeedDemon's update is also on the subtle but usable side, including a big security update to prevent malicious code inserted into an RSS feed from being executed. An additional feature has also been announced, which is called Popular Topics. FeedDemon can scour all of your subscriptions to see if there are any common threads linking them together. If so, it presents them in a custom view showing you items that are of enough interest that multiple people are talking about them. Be forewarned, though, you need to be subscribed to a fairly substantial number of feeds for this feature to be of much use. FeedDemon also feels a bit snappier, although no reference to specific performance updates were given in the release notes. If you're a FeedDemon user, I'd suggest getting involved in helping test the latest release. Nick's software is always so polished that even a beta version is very usable.

So what's the deal - everyone picked the same day to release new features? Although with the release of NewsGator Go! and the ability to take my feeds offline in my Pocket PC, I thought I'd finally settled on a platform, I now have more playing around to do with Bloglines (it's just more fun to use now), and Google Reader, the dark horse. The Google Reader update really came out of left field, but I can't wait to explore it since their first take at a feed reader was, well, weird. Looks like they've cleaned up their act.

Nick Bradbury is a good guy. You can get an idea of this by searching on his name in Technorati, and seeing what other bloggers have to say about him. The reason I bring this up is that I was blown away by the way in which Nick tackled the recent revelation that there is a security vulnerability in almost all current RSS aggregators that could allow a nefarious publisher to get a script to run on the reader's computer. Nick is the developer behind the absolutely excellent FeedDemon feed reader, which NewsGator purchased about a year ago. In Nick's case, due to the manner in which he uses Internet Explorer's rendering engine in "Internet Zone" mode, the exploit doesn't work on FeedDemon. That fact notwithstanding, Nick dove into the problem and came up with a fix to eliminate the vulnerability altogether. The new version of FeedDemon, 2.0.0.25, is available as of today, and includes a substantial performance enhancement.

All that is well and good, and for those of us that own a copy of FeedDemon the new version is a very worthwhile upgrade. But that's not what this story is about.

After figuring out the problem and a solution for it, Nick decided to share his knowledge with the RSS community, and is offering to help any other feed aggregator developers (in other words, his competition) to ensure that their applications are not vulnerable either. That's pretty cool.