Attensa (previous profiles here) is announcing a bunch of product upgrades and releases tomorrow. The most important are the removal of the beta status from their Outlook and Online RSS readers. Both products are at 1.0 status as of tomorrow morning.
Both readers have fairly advanced features. Attensa Online 1.0, which is Ajax driven, has been criticized during its beta period for not having enough features. Many of those features are now included, and some, like tagging, are on the way. And both readers are fast, at least under current loads. One feature that I like on both products is the ability to review posts on a folder/feed basis, or “river of news” where posts are shown in a more traditional email format as they come in.
The big win with RSS readers, though, is in synchronization across applications. There are two aspects to this – synchronization of the feed (OPML) list, and synchronization of the status (read/unread/tagged/pinned) of individual posts. Both are important, although the difficult problem is synchronizing posts. Attensa is doing both.
NewsGator does attempt to synchronize posts from both its FeedDemon desktop product and its Outlook product to its online product, but you cannot directly syncronize between FeedDemon and Newsgator. Also, synchronization often breaks.
Attensa claims their architecture is robust enough to handle the difficult sync problem. Further testing will show if this is accurate. Note that the Attensa readers are all free; however the synchronization feature is $20 per year after a 30 day free trial.
Attensa also has a third reader, for mobile devices, coming within “four weeks”.