NewsGator RSS Readers Now Free

Posted by Michael Garrett on January 9th, 2008

In a surprising change of plans, RSS company NewsGator has today announced that all of its highly-acclaimed RSS reader clients will be offered free of charge to anyone who wishes to download them.

Via the official NewsGator site, web surfers will have free access to download of FeedDemon (Windows client), NetNewsWire (Mac client), mobile RSS reader NewsGator Go! (including the Blackberry edition), as well as News Gator Inbox, which allows users to manage RSS content from within Microsoft’s Outlook email client.

Not only that, but each of these RSS readers has undergone some changes with new versions, also launched today, that add a slew of new features to attract an even bigger audience.

“What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients,” explains Greg Reinacker, NewsGator founder and CTO, of the reason for the generous changes. “Anyone who wants a rich experience for consuming content, or anyone who uses multiple computers or devices and wants a best-of-breed experience on each can now use our clients.”

Another reason for the change is to collect attention data, as previous moves by the company have already shown. Particularly NewsGator’s decision to join the APML workgroup back in October, as Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb mentions. Reinacker explains that “by using your data, in combination with aggregate data from other users, we can deliver a better experience for everyone.” As Catone’s article also mentions though, usage of web-based feed readers seems to outnumber the use of desktop-based software, which could potentially present an obstacle for NewsGator, but NewsGator Online is also getting some new additions and tweaks.

Although these clients are by no means barebones, I personally did not see any reason to pay for any of NewsGator’s clients previously since there are so many well-developed RSS readers available for free. Now, however, NewsGator may have just turned me into a convert. Anyone who uses a feed reader now has no reason not to try out one of these clients.

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