NewsGator has decided to offer all of its RSS readers for free, including the newest versions of NetNewsWire, FeedDemon and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile. NewsGator Inbox, which has just been launched in public beta, will also be available for free.

When Nick wrote about NewsGators’ latest round of funding, he noted that NewsGator’s desktop feed readers can be preferable to web-based feed readers like Google Reader. Whereas web-based readers often suffer from a lag during which they fail to show a site’s most recent stories, NewsGator’s desktop readers tend to load up-to-the-minute stories from your favorite sites.

NewsGator will rely on revenues from its enterprise offerings going forward. The company will also increasingly record anonymous usage data in an effort “to help make decisions about what content [it believes] will be most relevant for you and for other users.”

Makers of the desktop RSS reader, NewsGator, have raised a $12 million led by a new investor, Vista Ventures, and supported by existing investors Mobius, Venture Capital, and Masthead Venture Partners. This brings the total raised by NewsGator to $30 million over three rounds.

Their RSS reader has been a personal favorite of the TechCrunch team. I use it over Google reader, which can lag behind in keeping my feeds up to date. They also have a mobile version.

Although we know the company best for the reader, NewsGator has also developed several other RSS related products. They have enterprise servers for syndicating information from the web to your employees, their own widget framework, and a host of personal products. Readers considering enterprise syndication services should check out our coverage of Attensa too.

Update: NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston adds:

Over 1 million folks rely on NewsGator daily – whether through FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, our mobile applications, our enterprise server at 12 of the Fortune 100 (and many more companies), or readers of over 50 sites who work with our content and widgets (USA Today, CBS News, etc etc).

He confirms that NewsGator’s main sources of revenues come from licensing its software to enterprises and monthly service fees from media and consumer-products companies. The new investment will go towards strengthening its position “in the enterprise RSS space,” and he expects this will get the company to a breakeven point on profits.

A year ago I wrote a post called “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” and listed thirteen startups whose products made a real impact in my life. Those were the products that I loved, and used every day. I enjoyed sorting through the hundreds of startups that we had written about, and picking just a handful that made a real impact on my life. It was so much fun, actually, that I’m updating the list this year.

Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I’ve added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

Read More

RSS vendor Newsgator will announce tomorrow a new service for reading RSS feeds on Windows Mobile phones. Called Newsgator Go! the program will cost about $30 and will sync its data with other members of the Newsgator family: NetNewsWire for Mac, FeedDemon for PCs, Newsgator Online and Newsgator Inbox for Outlook. Newsgator products are my favorite for reading feeds and I’m excited to hear that the company will come out with a Java reader in coming months.

One of the best things about the product is that it will allow specific groups of feeds to be designated for sharing across devices via an interface in Newsgator Online. I moved to using NetNewsWire on my desktop when I grew frustrated with Newsgator Online’s inability to display more than a thousand feeds without choking, though the company tells me they’ve vastly improved the speed of the online version in recent months. One way or the other, I only want and need so many feeds on my phone. Newsgator Go! will also cache feed items locally on your phone so you can read them without going online.

Other options for reading your feeds on the go include Bloglines Mobile, the FeedBurner Mobile Feed Reader, the multi-featured mobile hydra Winksite, Dave Winer’s mobile River of News for select feeds and the forthcoming mobile tool suite SynapseLife.

There’s a screenshot of the Newsgator Go! interface posted at MobileCrunch.

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.

Newsgator and Feedburner are the two most active companies in the RSS space right now. When either of these companies say anything, I pay close attention. Yesterday Newsgator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker (listen to an interview with Greg Reinacker and executives from other feed readers on TalkCrunch) posted something that everyone interested in the future of RSS should pay attention to – a big roadmap for the company’s near term future.

Newsgator properties (including the Mac NetNewsWire) are the second most frequently used feed readers by TechCrunch subscribers according to Mike’s post on CrunchNotes – behind FireFox. I think the company’s roadmap speaks to the future of RSS syndication in general. What are the most recent innovations at Bloglines? Folding blog search into Ask.com and supporting flash inside the reader. The Newsgator next steps discussed in Reinacker’s post blow those away. I think that these are the features and issues that we’ll see from every other vendor in this space.

Highlights discussed below include:

• recommending feeds
• niche default subscription options
• social networking/comments about feeds
• RSS everywhere – where else can it go?
• feeds and podcasts by phone
• advertising, enterprise and private label possibilities.

Read More

Syndication is undoubtedly the heartbeat of the web 2.0 movement. A feed reader, the most common solution to consuming synidcated content, saves the user time by monitoring countless sites and sources and providing near real-time updates to one location.

There are a number of different types of readers: web-based, desktop, Outlook based, etc… This post is focused solely on web-based feed readers. I’ve included the big guys plus some up and coming readers with outstanding features and/or performance like News Alloy, Gritwire, Attensa and FeedLounge.

All the web-based feed readers reviewed are free except for FeedLounge, which charges $5 per month.

The Web-based Feed Readers

I examined nine web-based feed readers (for previous reviews of each of these, see the TechCrunch Index):

• Attensa Online
• Bloglines
• FeedLounge
• Google Reader
• Gritwire
• News Alloy
• NewsGator Online
• Pluck Web Edition
• Rojo

I did not evaluate MyYahoo, the most widely used web-based reader, or similar products like Live.com, Google IG and Netvibes because these are more virtual desktop applications or portals with RSS reading built in. Heavy RSS users need a more industrial strength application like the ones I have listed above. I believe MyYahoo is a great option for a quick read of your feeds or for on the go feed readers viewing the Internet via cell phone or handheld device, but this service does not have the feature set for a heavy information consumer.

Researching these nine readers further underscores the extremely competitive atmosphere surrounding this industry’s development. On a feature-set basis only, two companies stood out: Rojo and Bloglines.

Google Reader and FeedLounge won my subjective feed-load test, which determines how well the application pulls up a particular feed. The test consisted of loading five feeds and taking the average of the load times and rating the reader on a five-point scale. Interestingly, FeedLounge is the only premium service of the group at $5 a month. Aside from the exceptional performance rating, I wonder what else sets FeedLounge apart from its free competitors. However, many users are religious about readers with a three pane display that FeedLounge, Attensa and Gritwire all offer.

Web 2.0 Features

Rojo, a San Francisco-based company which was reviewed previously on TechCrunch, has the most prominent web 2.0 swagger. News Alloy offers a close second though with itís tagging, rating and other content repositioning (i.e. add to Digg, add to del.icio.us).

User Ratings: Several of the readers offer rating systems, but I think Rojo’s “Mojo” is the most appealing. Mojo, a term reflecting user-generated reviews, mirrors a feature on the popular social news aggregator digg. After entering an item in the feed you can Mojo it to boost its relevance. NewsGator Online also offers a user generated content feature called “Latest Buzz,” which determines and displays the number of people linking to items in NewsGator. News Alloy employs a rating system similar to Rojo that tallies the number of times someone rates an item.

Tagging: Rojo generates a tag cloud from user-generated tags. Google Reader offers the same feature under a different name, “labels.” It seems FeedLounge uses tagging as the sole search and discovery mechanism. News Alloy also allows tagging of posts.

Social Aspects: Rojo and Gritwire feature “contacts,” which adds a social aspect to the reader, allowing a user to share information within a network of contacts.

Feed Discovery & Recommendations: Pluck, a Texas-based social media company, built a feature called FeedFinder into its Web Edition, which improves feed discovery. Rojo recommendations feeds in the top right corner of the layout while you browse.

Up and Coming Readers

Attensa, a Portland-based company, offers a reader that has a very professional and clean interface. While lacking many features the rest of the pack has, it pulls feeds up very quickly. In talking with Matthew Bookspan, Attensa’s Director of Product, I learned Attensa will be launching a new and improved version of the web-based reader that should fare better on the comparison chart. Additionally, Attensa will soon offer a mobile-enabled view of its reader, rendering nicely in handheld devices or cell phones.

Gritwire, a company based just north of Chicago, boasts a Flash-based feed reader that performs very well and offers integrated social networking features similar to Rojo. Gritwire uses a contact-list approach that allows you to share feeds among friends. I spoke with Ian Carswell, Gritwire’s co-founder and COO, who said Gritwire has more web 2.0 features in store, and I am curious to see them in action.

News Alloy, offers an Ajax driven reader with lots of power user bells and whistles. Though it underperformed in the subjective feed-load test Mike reviewed it previously on TechCrunch and found it to be extremely fast in other operations.

Feature Comparison Chart

The chart summarizes the research conducted in comparing these readers. I was not able to speak with every company directly so I may have missed some details. Consider this chart a living document to be updated if additional information becomes available. Also, I have left a number of competitors off this chart – there are so many web-based readers and I had to limit research to what I consider the main players in the field.

Summary

If you are looking purely for performance, Google Reader and FeedLounge are the fastest in our tests. Bloglines and Rojo are the best choice if you are looking for a feature rich application (and Rojo blows Bloglines away on “web 2.0″ type features).

None, however, yet approach the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

Editor’s Note: Frank Gruber, who writes the excellent blog Somewhat Frank, accepted our offer to write this research piece on TechCrunch. Thank you, Frank.

Update: March 31, 2006 (updates to chart)

Editor’s Note: This is a profile of NewsGator’s online product only, not its outlook, feeddemon and other products. There is a natural tendency to view NewsGator Online in comparison to Bloglines, as the products are both very popular and similar in many ways.

Company: NewsGator

Founded: 2003. Acquired Feeddemon in May 2005.

What is it?

This profile reviews only NewsGator’s online product. NewsGator has a number of other popular products, including an Outlook product and the products offered by Feeddemon (recently acquired by NewsGator).

We will probably profile NewsGator’s other products soon. They’ve recently changed their pricing structure, and based on its complexity (and user feedback), we suspect things may be further simplified over time. Today, Nick Bradbury (Feeddemon founder) further changed pricing for his product.

The reason we like the Online edition is that it is not tied to a single computer. You can log in from anywhere. Also, Bloglines is the gold standard of web-based RSS readers, and it is natural to compare and contrast the two services (see our Blogines profile here)

Key Features of NewsGator Online:

- easy import of feeds opml file
- two pane interface – clippings, folders and feeds on the left, content on the right (similar to bloglines)
- alphabetizes feeds
- can view all feeds, or just feeds with new content
- fast updating
- great “clipping” tool to save content with one click
- sorting options includ by date, view older/newer first
- nascent search abilities

NewsGator v. Bloglines:

Bloglines has recently had significant delays in updating feeds – often updating only once a week. That means content comes infrequently and is stale – just the opposite of the core reason for using an RSS reader. Their site is also down quite often (who’s seen the infamous Bloglines Plumber recently?) They are the largest RSS reader (other than Yahoo) (Bloglines accounts for about 30% of Techcrunch subscriptions, NewsGator is a close second), but these problems are leading many users to try out other services.

However, even with its shortcoming, we find that NewsGator Online is not as good as Bloglines (but it’s close).

To test NewsGator, we imported our Bloglines feeds and used it exclusively for a few days. Importing was easy, thanks to the Bloglines export feature and the NewsGator import feature. Snafus are noted below.

Things NewsGator does better than Bloglines:

1. Feeds are updated much more frequently on NewsGator (a very, very important feature).

2. While both services have a “clippings” feature, we found NewsGator’s to be much easier to use – one click. Also, the clippings folder is added to the main directory on the left pane, whereas bloglines has an additional tab to click to view clipped items.

3. If you want a PC or Mac based desktop client, you have the ability to sync feeds with that client so you don’t read the same content twice (Bloglines doesn’t offer a desktop service).

4. NewsGator was never down during our testing period. Bloglines is down frequently.

Things Bloglines does better than NewsGator:

1. Both have two pane interfaces, but Bloglines allows scrolling of the left pane whereas NewsGator doesn’t. This means that you can peruse feeds without losing the content in the right pane. This seems like a small issue, but we found it really annoying when using NewsGator.

2. Bloglines has a “mark all read” feature that clears out all unread content. NewsGator doesn’t have this feature, meaning we had to click on each and every one of our 250+ feeds after importing the opml file to clear out old content. This was a one-time issue, but it certainly got us off on the wrong foot with regard to our NewsGator experience.

3. Both services alphabetize feeds. However, Bloglines disregards “the” before the feedname, and we found it difficult to find the feeds we were used to reading by the name we remembered them by.

4. Bloglines shows the number of subscribers for each feed, and you can view public subscribers. NewsGator doesn’t do this.

5. Bloglines allows you to view public subscriptions of other users (and add them to your own). NewsGator doesn’t have this feature. Bloglines also has a permanent URI for each subscriber’s public feeds. As an example, here are all of my personal feeds on Bloglines.

6. Bloglines has a “keep new” feature for each post that is useful. NewsGator has no equivalent feature.

7. Bloglines has a useful but little known about email feature – you can create an email address and all emails to that address show up as a feed in bloglines. It’s very useful for subscribing to newsletter type emails that you’d rather have in your RSS reader than your email inbox.

Things Both do well:

Both have great user interfaces, options to open content in a new window or the existing window, options for folders to group feeds and good customer service (inquiries about both were answered promptly, within 24 hours even over a weekend).

Neither service has tagging of content, something Rojo (Rojo profile) has, and we’d like to see further experiments in this area.

Summary:

To be honest, we could be happy with either one. But if forced to choose, we choose Bloglines based on features available today. If the feed updating issue isn’t worked out, however, or if we see that damn bloglines plumber more than once a month, things may change quickly.

NewsGator has a good track record of responding quickly to user feedback, and most of the blogines features mentioned here could easily be added to NewsGator.

Finally, we note that with the ease of opml exports of feeds, there is no real lock-in of users, and a newcomer with fresh ideas could easily and quickly gain real market share.

NewsGator Management:

J.B. Holston – CEO and President
Greg Reinacker – CTO and Founder
A.V. “Sandy�? Hamilton – EVP Sales, Marketing and Business Development
Mark Nass – VP of Finance and Administration
Link

Links:

About
Press
Support
NewsGator Blog
Greg Reinacker
Brad Feld on NewsGator Pricing
Nick Bradbury (Feeddemon Founder)
RSS Compendium Blog
Don’t Back Down (“Newsgator is again going on the back burner. Just too many things that don’t work right.”)
Momathome
knowledge jolt with jack
home office voice
Azizi Jennis
Useful Sounds (slow bloglines updates)
Leonid Mamchenkov
Otherwise engaged (bloglines origins)
Fanteja
feednation (a newcomer to think about as an option, with incredible tagging and search options)

Tags: newsgator, bloglines, feeddemon, rss, rssreaders, techcrunch, web2.0, feednation, rojo