The news that Newsgator was giving away its software suite for individuals — including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Newsgator Go, and others — gave me the incentive to give their offerings a try.  I have been a loyal fan of Google Reader (or Bloglines — hey, I’m fickle) for several years and didn’t see any substantial benefit to using a mostly desktop-based feed reader that wasn’t free.  I downloaded FeedDemon on my work laptop and then downloaded the Blackberry client for Newgator Go.  After using them for the last few days, I am pleasantly surprised.

First of all, even though FeedDemon is desktop-based, it has a built-in sync capability so that everything is in sync between what I read (or don’t read) on my laptop, Blackberry, or even on the web.  Second, the fact that there is a nice, functional Blackberry client is very important for me.  Here is where Newsgator beats any other tool I’ve tried including Google Reader, Bloglines Mobile, and two or three other Blackberry-specific RSS readers.  Third, I realize that FeedDemon has some pretty cool functionality that is either easier to use or doesn’t exist at all in Google Reader or Bloglines, including the ability to readily see what feeds I pay the most attention to (similar to Trends in Google Reader but easier and nicer to use), and another feature that readily allows you to see who else is commenting on/linking to a story that you see in FeedDemon.  I am a big user of keyboard shortcuts in any tool I use and FeedDemon as well as the Blackberry client for Newsgator Go have lots of them that I was able to quickly learn and use.  There is much more, such as built-in reports to identify feeds that haven’t published recently (called Dinosaurs), and Watches, which allows the user to put in keyword searches against all subscribed feeds to more readily and quickly pick up on news items of particular interest.

Newsgator has gone from not even an also ran to something that might stick around for a while.  We’ll see.  It’s certainly worth a try.

For a good discussion of the worthiness of desktop-based feed readers vs. web-based, see this post from one of the main developers of FeedDemon, Nick Bradbury.  Again, keep in mind that I have most definitely been of the web-based reader camp for years, but I can now positively attest to what he points out.  For example, updates to feeds are incredibly fast, much faster than I have ever experienced in any other reader.  This is a huge deal for me and is the main reason I have often become infuriated with Bloglines in particular.

P.S.  Oh yeah, did I also mention that FeedDemon has built-in integration with my favorite desktop-based blogging tool, Windows Live Writer?