Yikes…I hate to see NewsGator getting slammed in an article. I’d like to respond to the “problems” the author, Ryan Singel, found with NewsGator:
It has troubles with sites that use a third party to take care of their feeds (latimes.com, for example, uses NewsIsFree.com for Web syndication). With that kind of feed, you need to click on a link essentially twice.
It doesn’t have any trouble with these sites; NewsGator shows exactly the content that the publisher puts in the feed. If it’s only a headline and/or excerpt, as with the feeds he mentions, that’s all that will be shown.
There is also a NewsGator extension from Graeme Foster called FetchLinks, which will selectively retrieve the linked page into Outlook in situations like this. This can address the underlying inconvenience he’s talking about with these particular feeds.
There also doesn’t seem to be a way to rearrange the feeds, which are displayed alphabetically. Moreover, while grouping feeds into folders is possible, NewsGator cannot show you all the items in a folder or even tell you how many items are in there.
This is how Outlook works. One of the real value-adds of NewsGator is the fact that it works within Outlook, and you don’t need to learn new tools and new ways of working. Folder arrangement and unread counts work exactly as they do with email folders.
And we do of course show unread message counts for folders, as shown here.
Further, using Outlook organizational capabilities such as search folders can make a big difference in the way you use the product. Again, since NewsGator is built into Outlook, it has a huge amount of flexibility. More info on search folders with NewsGator here and here.
NewsGator is useful for those who don’t want another application running. But it’s best only for those who read a handful of news sources and don’t mind clicking multiple times to see a story.
Only useful for those who read a handful of news sources? Hmm…Robert Scoble has said publicly many times that he reads over 1400 weblogs and news sources with NewsGator. I’m not sure what else I can say – 1400 is a lot of feeds, and NewsGator is the tool that makes it possible for him.
Hmm, was the writer partial? I think so. Does he not understand that NewsGator works because Outlook works? I highly doubt it. It seems as if his lack of knowledge and pursuance of determining those issues was his problem, not NewsGator. Well stated Greg, and hopefully people reading that will try NewsGator out themselves and come to realize that the author was an idiot.
BTW Greg – you can send a comment on an article, its underneath the article on page one on the left.
Greg,
As a convert to NewsGator from another reader and thankful for your help getting the demo running on my machine, I just had to read and comment on that article. I don’t think the author tried it for more than a day or two. I’ve got 56 feeds I check and besides finding the time to scan them all, NewsGator handles them great.
Here’s my comment to the author on his article:
I completely disagree with your assessment of NewsGator. I manage almost 60 feeds with no problems. I also have feeds that use Moreover and NewsIsFree and haven’t experienced the double link clicking you experience. My click NewsIsFree is automatically forwarded to the correct site.
I’ve tried about 6 feedreaders including FeedReader, FeedDemon, KlipFolio, BlogLines, and WildGrape and NewGator is the one I settled on and even paid for because since I am in Outlook all the time and having it running all the time I don’t have yet another app to be running. I also can very easily forward a post from a feed to a friend who doesn’t use feeds…much faster than visiting the page and e-mailing the link. They get the link and whatever summary is present.
And I actually settled on NewsGator after trying it for a day, ditching it, using KlipFolio (it’s free) and not liking the screen clutter, and going back to NewsGator and buying it.
Webfeeds are an invaluable tool for info-centric workers and I think if you use Outlook, it is a really powerful option.
Greg, you summarized my thoughts exactly. When I saw the headline about the RSS-aggregator test, I was almost certain that NewsGator would win hands down.
However, after seeing the NewsGator -part of the review, I didn’t bother reading the article further as it was obviously hastily done.
Keep up the good work! :)
Another way to look at it is that the Wired chap highlighted some possibly non-intuitive parts of Newsgator. Other users will possibly be less driven to work-with Newsgator than the reviewer too and so give it less of their time to prove it works well. Just a thought :)