FeedDemon is cool!

FeedDemon – no, its not the devil 🙂

I have been reading RSS feeds for some time now, probably 2003-2004, I started off with SharpReader, then moved to RSSBandit, then I tried out NewsGator. NewsGator had/has a plugin for Outlook, and before Outlook 2007 this was cool, I used it for awhile. I noticed though that I wasn’t getting as much out of it as I was from using NewsGator online. The one cool thing about NewsGator is that is more of a feed storage engine than anything. I can use the Media Center plugin to read feeds there, there is some mobile stuff, and I can goto any computer or use any program that supports the NewsGator API and my feeds OPML sync across all clients.

I have also tried BlogLines but just never thought it was user friendly enough. I also tried Outlook 2007 for about 10 minutes and knew right away I would be back like the NewsGator plugin for Outlook.

So, a while back, NewsGator aquired FeedDemon, and in it’s early form, it was kind of so-so. They recently upgraded it and you can get it here. I downloaded it a couple weeks ago, and wow – what a great tool.

I subscribe to between 350-400 feeds at any given time, and it gets to be a lot, and FeedDemon really helps me sort through the crap, and read feeds faster. The cool things are Watches and News Bin. I can set up a search on keywords and it will find them so I can read those faster, also, I can quickly save a post to a News Bin and go back to it later. It also integrates with IE (which is OK, I use Firefox all the time, but with IE7 at least I feel somewhat secure), and there are tabs within the app itself which makes life easier.

I will say, that there are some features that I think could be added .For one, an easier way to mark pages read, especially at the bottom of a page, and better emailing integration. There is a cool feature that will analyze your feeds and make a “front page” that shows the most popular posts. I wish I could run this on more than just all my feeds, maybe run this on a sub folder, etc.

In any event, if you read a lot of RSS Feeds, I would recommend checking out FeedDemon. It is a 30 day free trial, and $30 after that, which I am gladly going to fork over 🙂