If you're loving Twitter's new lists feature, but you're finding yourself a bit overwhelmed by following so many new people, there might be a better way to try out a list. One Twitter user has put together a list-to-RSS script. All you have to do is pop a list's URL into the site and drop the resulting feed URL into your reader. This way, you don't have to check the list on the web, and you don't have follow everyone on it.

Be warned, the list-to-RSS site has run into some rate-limit issues with Twitter's APIs, so you may have to check back periodically if it doesn't work for you on the first try. Meanwhile, if you're still looking for some good lists to subscribe to, may I recommend the Download Squad team list? Sebastian has also collected some great list recommendations and a step-by-step guide to using lists in an earlier Download Squad post.

The story of how NewsGator attempted to corner the market on consumer RSS has taken another strange turn. In an interview with Steven Hodson published on Hodson's Shooting at Bubbles site, Bradbury admits that he is no longer employed by NewsGator, but has retained the full rights to his popular FeedDemon RSS reader. NewsGator continues to offer FeedDemon, and the application is still NewsGator-branded, but the clear implication here is that NewsGator no longer owns the rights to the most popular native Windows RSS feed reader.

It's no secret that NewsGator almost single-minded focus on capturing the lucrative enterprise market allowed its efforts in the consumer space to falter, ultimately leading to NewsGator shutting down their once-popular NewsGator Online feed reader, having conceded the online feed reader battle to Google's upstart Google Reader, which has iterated faster, and performing better than NewsGator's online reader for a few years.

It's unfortunate that NewsGator has given up on this market. While it's certainly true that Google has a powerful and successful product on its hands, there is certainly room in the RSS space for more than one dedicated company. What this means for FeedDemon's Mac equivalent, NetNewsWire remains to be seen, but since NewsGator's current push for more enterprise business relies on the talents of Brent Simmons, NetNewsWire will likely remain a NewsGator property for the foreseeable future.

Whether that is good news or not is anyone's guess.

UPDATE: The previous headline of this post turned out to be incorrect, as Nick Bradbury points out in the comments. The relationship between FeedDemon, NewsGator and Bradbury is a bit confusing, but what he said in the interview was this: "I'm no longer employed by NewsGator. FeedDemon remains a NewsGator-branded product, but I'm 100% in charge of it now, and I'm once again an indie developer. FeedDemon is my sole focus – and my sole source of income." So, NewsGator owns FeedDemon, Bradbury works on FeedDemon, but Bradbury does not work FOR NewsGator any longer.

Bradbury also pointed us to a post by NewsGator's Greg Reinacker, explaining more about where things stand.

The number of gadgets for Windows 7, both made by Microsoft and third-party developers, has skyrocketed. Only a few months ago there was little choice and almost nothing worth calling home about -- but today, you're spoilt for choice! What you have here are a bunch of the most useful (or interesting) gadgets usable with your shiny-new OS, Windows 7.

Note: If you're going to be installing third-party gadgets, you'll be faced with a confirmation dialogue before they can install:
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Google has made a couple of big improvements to Google Reader, aimed at helping you easily sift through all those RSS feeds to get to the stories you'll find most relevant. One set of new features focuses on finding relevant content that you weren't already aware of, and another feature sorts the stuff you're already subscribed to.

In the sidebar, you'll notice a new "recommended sources" list. These are sites Google Reader thinks you'll like, based on your browsing habits -- if you've opted-in to let Google track those -- and your reading habits in Reader itself. You'll also see a Popular Items section from around the web, showing you some well-read and potentially relevant posts from sites you're not subscribed to.

In addition to these ways of finding new feeds to read, Google Reader can now sort your existing items "by magic," bringing the most relevant articles to the top of your list. To make this happen, go to the settings dropdown for one of your feeds or folders and choose "sort by magic." The magic is actually an algorithm that takes into account what you read and share in Reader, and it seems to work pretty well. I'm not a frequent Google Reader user, and even my relatively untrained recommendations were interesting. If you share and like items on a regular basis, yours will likely be even better.

[via Mashable]

Live Bookmarks in Firefox are a great idea in theory, but in practice they're a clumsy solution for in-browser feed reading. Brief is an add-on that breathes some life into Live Bookmarks with a nice-looking, usable front end. Setting up Brief is a quick and painless process: just install the add-on and point it to a folder full of RSS feeds. A toolbar button and a status bar button (with your unread items count) will automatically appear, and clicking either one pops open the reader.

Brief's not a bad little reader, either. The layout is attractive, and having a reader inside Firefox means you can quickly click through to the full versions of articles. If you're a CSS whiz, you can even customize the Brief's appearance. I recommend turning on the option to open Brief in a new tab. Otherwise, it can quickly become annoying when it loads in your active tab and takes you away from a page you still wanted to look at.

[via InstantFundas]

This is definitely one for the developers amongst you, but if you're developing an application in PHP and need to handle the reading of RSS feeds, SimplePie is a god-send. Some folks will point you in the direction of PHP5's built-in SimpleXML module, however it's highly intolerant of malformed XML - and certainly doesn't have any extra features such as caching that you get with SimplePie.

If you're looking for an easy way to work with RSS or Atom feeds, SimplePie is both easy to implement - and thoroughly documented to help you build on it. I've used SimplePie in a number of projects in the last year - from multi-feed collation to simply showing a list of recent blog posts in a sidebar - and every time I use it I find myself grinning like a cheshire cat at the amount of time it has saved me.

SimplePie is available under the BSD licence for your hacking pleasure, and the developers are currently seeking feedback for version 2!

NetNewsWire, the Mac OS X RSS client from Newsgator, has reached version 3.2, bringing out of Beta the application's Google Reader support.

Formerly used to connect to Newsgator's own servers, NetNewsWire entered a period of rapid change on 30th July, when it was announced on Newsgator's blog that the consumer back end service was to be discontinued on August 31st 2009.

Although NetNewsWire has always been a great application, I think many users, like me, were torn between the excellent online service that Google Reader offered and the leading desktop client experience provided by NetNewsWire. Thankfully the shift by Newsgator to the Google Reader back-end made this problem go away. Hurrah!

As well as Google Reader compatibility, Instapaper posting, the ability to subscribe to authenticated feeds, improved Snow Leopard compatibility and a host of tweaks and fixes, the new release makes another significant change - the move to an ad supported model. Previously NetNewsWire was completely free, however there is now a small advertisement in the bottom left corner that can be removed by registering for the very reasonable price of $9.95.

Newsgator's Windows client FeedDemon has also undergone the same changes (and shares the same pricing model), as we covered earlier today.

Popular Windows RSS reader FeedDemon has hit version 3.0, and the latest version includes a number of new and tweaked features. This summer the team behind the RSS reader announced they would be shutting down the NewsGator web-based RSS reader. Instead, FeedDemon now synchronizes with Google Reader. That means you can read through your subscriptions in either Google Reader or FeedDemon and your read, unread, and starred items will be reflected in both RSS readers.

FeedDemon 3.0 also has a new user interface with a subscription home page with popular articles and videos from your feeds, tagging and tag clouds on the subscriptions home page, and enhanced Twitter support for sharing links through Twitter and reading RSS feeds of Twitter users you follow.

Another cool feature is the ability to subscribe to feeds for search terms. Just select the New Subscription option under the File menu and enter a keyword or search term. The next window will ask you to choose from a list of sites to search including Google News, Google Blog Search, Flickr, Techmeme or Twitter. Or you can find existing feeds that match your search terms.

FeedDemon is available as a free ad-supported download. As you can see in the screenshot, the ads are relatively unobtrusive and hang out in the bottom left corner. You can also buy a license for FeedDemon for $10 to make the ads go away.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Blogs are a dime-a-dozen these days. There's no shortage of sites dedicated to posting articles on just about anything you could possibly be interested in. Regator.com, a website dedicated to sifting through the countless blogs on the internet has finally released their own companion iPhone application.

If you're not familiar with Regator, it's a great web resource that highlights the web's best posts from the web's best blogs. It acts as a news aggregator breaking down blog sites into categories and offering a fun way to discover content on the internet. The new application, Regator for iPhone [iTunes Link] promises much of the same thing with a slick and easy to use interface and some great features.

So what makes Regator for iPhone so great? It's the only mobile application that allows users to browse, search, share and read thousands of the web's best blogs. It might sound a lot like an RSS reader, but it's so much more than that. By collecting, sorting and providing readers with thousands of articles, it's an easy source for news on almost any subject.

A few shots of Regator in action:

A few days ago we let you know that NewsGator was planning to shut down its once-popular web-based RSS reader. But it looks like the NewsGator web client isn't the only product on the chopping block. The company is also killing off NewsGator Go! and NewsGator Inbox.

NewsGator Inbox is an application that works with Microsoft Outlook to let you read and manage your feeds from the email client. NewGator Go! is a mobile application for BlakBerry and Windows Mobile phones and PDAs, as well as other Java-enabled smartphones.

NewsGator will be launching a new iPhone app soon, but for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry users, the company has this bit of advice: Find a new application that syncs with Google Reader. The company's existing products like the FeedDemon and NetNewsWire desktop RSS readers will be able to synchronize your feeds and read/unread items with Google Reader. It looks like the company decided to retired Inbox and Go! rather than build the same functionality into those apps.

How do you get your news on the go? Do you use a mobile RSS reader for BlackBerry or Windows Mobile? Or do you just use the mobile web interface for Google Reader? Let us know in the comments.

[via The::Unwired]

It's sad to see NewsGator go, especially if you hate using Google Reader. On the other hand, it seems pretty obvious that Google Reader's userbase is huge, and this move gives NetNewsWire and FeedDemon a chance to pick up some of those users for themselves. Personally, I never used Google Reader because I couldn't sync NetNewsWire with it, and, and if I'm not alone, Google might get a few new users out of the deal, too.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

If you use Google News frequently, you may have recently noticed something missing from your search results. The buttons to create RSS feeds from search results have been removed from the page.

The missing buttons don't prevent you from creating RSS feeds anyway, though. There are a couple of ways to do it. If your browser autodetects RSS, you can just click the RSS icon in the address bar to get a feed going. You can also get a feed by creating a new Google Alert and selecting "feed" from the dropdown menu.


[via ReadWriteWeb]

RSS has finally caught on to the point where even my non-geek friends have downloaded readers and subscribed to a few feeds. The thing is, you can't really hand out RSS feeds at a rally, post them on a bulletin board, or leave them on a table where someone will pick them up and read them. That's why it's nice that fivefilters.org has provided a free way to turn your favorite feeds into printable PDF newspapers.

I'm as anti-paper as the next guy - heck, I haven't owned a printer in years - but I know my mom's not going to read my blog if I don't hand it to her in paper form. I could do all the formatting myself, but Five Filters takes care of it automatically. The only major limitation is that it can only draw from one feed URL per PDF, but you can work around that by combining feeds using Yahoo! Pipes or a similar tool. It would be nice to pick and choose individual items from a feed reader to go into each newspaper, but this tool gets the basic job done, and the price is certainly right.