nan | 楠木

One of the more interesting web2.0 news today was Newsgator announcing that their whole range of RSS software is now free for download. This of course includes FeedDemon, which is arguably the best RSS client on the market.

Newsgator claims to have several reasons for this change in business model, including the wish to collect more user data in order to enhance their tools.

It would be interesting to see if this move can counter the overall trend of users preferring browser-based readers over offline software. My feeling is that it won’t. Sure, for heavy RSS users, the browser-based RSS experience cannot match the speed and ease of management of FeedDemon, but browser-based readers have one major advantage: you can access it anywhere from any device. Even as a casual RSS user, I don’t want to have to configure multiple clients on several devices, and I’m willing to sacrifice some speed for the easy accessibility.

In time, offline clients would orient more and more towards professional users (such as Lotus Notes and Outlook for business enterprises), whereas the mass consumer would probably just go with the browser-based software, because it offers ubiquitous access and has functionality that is “good enough”.