NewsGator buys FeedDemon

If you’ve read my ramblings in the past, you know that my RSS reader of choice is FeedDemon. I love this program. Well apparently so does NewsGator, as they have obtained Bradsoft software and Nick Bradbury. The plan is to turn FeedDemon into part of a subscription based model that will allow you to sync with NewsGator servers. To that end, they will be giving all paid FeedDemon users a free two-year subscription (not sure what level yet.) That’s all well and good, but they better NOT do the following three things.

  • Do not force me to go through NewsGator servers to hit news feeds. FeedDemon needs to continue to work standalone without requiring a NewsGator server hit. Syncing with NewsGator is nice, but it shouldn’t be required.
  • Do not get rid of Bloglines support. Bloglines is a NewsGator competitor that currently is free. DO NOT stop supporting it.
  • Do not stop the ability for FeedDemon to work standalone once the subscription ends. I better not be required to have a subscription to continue to use FeedDemon like I do now.

If they hit any of these, I may have to really re-think my favorite feed reader choice! I did just sign up for a NewsGator account though. And it looks pretty decent. Maybe even better than Bloglines, so who knows… maybe this won’t be a bad thing even if some of the above changes…