Newsgator just announced the release of a new beta browser toolbar for Windows users of Newsgator Online, Newsgator Inbox and FeedDemon. Some key functionality has been added that will help the company compete with competitor Bloglines.
Users will now be able to subscribe with one click to any page’s RSS feed in IE and Firefox, a feature that had made Bloglines the easiest online feed reader to use. The toolbar also displays the number of Newsgator subscribers to the feed, inbound links to the URL you are viewing, a feed preview and a search box to discover new feeds by keyword.
This is a very smart addition to the company’s offerings that I’m surprised took so long and I wish it was available for the Mac. One click subscribe is available in NetNewsWire, but the other features would be nice. If this were just a FireFox plug-in that would be ideal.
While Bloglines has long been the favorite feed reader for people looking for a simple but powerful tool, the new Newsgator toolbar means that users seeking many of these features now have options. Newsgator provides a river of news feature that Bloglines does not and handles OPML files much more gracefully. The search feature will probably not be as good, though, as the one at Bloglines - which is backed up by Ask.com and requires that Bloglines users are subscribed to a feed before it is displayed in search results in order to exclude splogs.
Newsgator is one of the leading RSS companies on the market. The company has provided white label solutions for NewsWeek, USAToday and many other companies. 15% of TechCrunch subscribers use Newsgator services, second only to FireFox Live Bookmarks at 27%. We last wrote about the company when it released a road map for the future of RSS.
See all
Post
I personally don’t like toolbars too much (the only one I’m using is the web developer toolbar for Firefox), as with too many toolbars, the interface gets cluttered. But, this is a good move for them, since by increasing the usefulness, they’re sure to get more/retain users - and toolbars themselves arre good at generating revenues.
Would be much better if they actually released a Firefox .XPI extension for FF users instead of having them install that pesky .exe file.
Also tell me this:- why in the world has no company (to my knowledge) released a product with the ability to discover feeds en masse? Many don’t have this feature, while others that do only work on a per-site basis… darn tedious.
There’s no need for a similar toolbar for NetnewsWire, at least not for one-click subscribe with Safari. In Safari’s preferences under the “RSS” tab, just select NetNewsWire as your default RSS reader. Then when you click on a link to a feed, it will open in NNW.
I would actually use NewsGator because I’m quite fond of its ability to sync with NetNewsWire, but I don’t because - compared to Bloglines - it’s practically unreadable. Everything is too small and there’s not enough spacing. What they need much more than a toolbar is a good designer.
I’m surprised there’s no references here to Rojo. It’s been covered on TechCrunch before and other than some unforgiving non-parsing malformed feeds, I’ve found Rojo much easier to look at and use. It provides great tools for discovering related feeds both through it’s digg-like ‘mojo’ feature and links above feeds that suggest related blogs to you. You can add a one-click Rojo bookmark and favorite articles are kept in one place so you don’t have to hunt and peck as with Bloglines (you can also link to this ‘favorited’ list if you want to share what you’ve been reading on your blog). I haven’t compared the search features.
That said I still use Firefox’s live bookmarks to monitor my favorite newsgroups.
I just ran across an article that sums up some big differences from someone who converted to Rojo, tried Newsgator Online among others, after Bloglines had some technical issues for a couple of days: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/t.....glines.htm
Hmm… this will be close to useless in FF 2.0 though. The product incorporates one click subscriptions for several newsreaders ‘out of the box’ and you can add others.
I like Rojo too… no one else that I’m aware of allows me to apply multiple tags to a feed.
Unfortunately Techcrunch doesn’t display at all well in Newsgator. In fact every second post is unreadable. After pointing it out to Newsgator support they told me it is a problem with the TC xml…
“This is a very smart addition to the company’s offerings that I’m surprised took so long and I wish it was available for the Mac desktop program NetNewWire.”
Mike, you don’t need this for one-click subscribing on the Mac with NNW.
If you’re in Safari or NNW, click on the RSS link (Blue RSS icon in the address bar in Safari and an orange icon on the bottom right of the browser screen in NNW) and it will automatically open up the “Subscribe to this Feed” dialog in NNW with the info prepopulated.
To make this work, you go into Safari preferences and select NNW as your default RSS aggregator (which makes this a system wide default preference).
I am not sure how this would work in Firefox or other browsers, but it may work the same.
Note taken re NNW, thanks.
Try the new browser on the block: Flock. It uses the Firefox/Mozilla engine to render pages, but has some really cool features for those online junkies that blog and flickr themselves to death… And, to the point, it has one-click RSS subscription functionality by default.
Aggregation is just aggregation. The toolbar just helps you collect more. The question is what are you going to do with all the feeds you subscribe? Once your subscription list grows to more than a hundred feeds, they just pile up and you do not have time to read them. What is needed is ways that will help users find the important stuff from the large influx and get to them quickly. That is what we do.
Not sure, why users will want to have another toolbar to install !!
Secondly, mobile bloglines is working just fine mobile device- its stickiness is great.. !!
Jonathan - not sure what set up you have but I have no problems reading TC online or in Outlook
IE7 beta 3 - probably not many people using it yet, but when MS roll it out as part of an update in a month or two it will impact a few people.
Newsgator said this: I’ve run the feed through FeedValidator, and it appears to have a number of problems:
http://feedvalidator.org/check.....Techcrunch
This is a great news and yet more cool stuff from the NewsGator team. I’ve been very impressed with their approach. I use a PC at home, Mac at work (how’s that for a non-traditional mix??), and the new beta Smartphone NewsGator reader on my MS Smartphone. The only piece that is missing is a method of sharing content/feeds with my friends similar to the public view of Newsgator. But all in all, the NG team is doing incredible work.
I wish Newsgator would add keyboard shortcuts for their web based reader. They’ve got it down as a feature request but haven’t added it yet. That’s the only thing that’s keeping me from moving away from Bloglines.
I’ve been using Newsgator for the past two weeks, because Bloglines continues to have problems with feed counts getting updated. I really don’t like Newsgator’s interface (I like the frames and keyboard shortcuts of Bloglines), and I find that Bloglines is significantly faster. However, until Bloglines gets their feed monitoring problems fixed, I’m going to be using Newsgator.
Wasn’t there spyware or malware out a couple of years ago that was called gator something or other? That app made me gunshy of any applications or companies related to the word ‘gator’.
I’m starting to get itchy already!
Wasn’t there spyware or malware out a couple of years ago that was called gator something or other?! That app made me gunshy of any applications or companies related to the word ‘gator’.
I’m starting to get itchy already!
Note taken re NNW, thanks.