Users of the online feed reader are kindly requested to migrate their subscriptions over to Google Reader before August 31, and NewsGator will provide step-by-step instructions and in-product reminders to make sure all goes smoothly.

Speaking of NewsGator’s desktop RSS readers, which include FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Macs, they have both been updated to a new version. Users of the software programs are asked to download the updated versions in the next 30 days, and in another testament to the company’s friendly relationship with Mountain View it is mostly touting the new synchronization feature with Google Reader as a selling point. The programs are offered free of charge, but that hasn’t always been the case; in fact they announced they would be waiving the cost of the products in January 2008.

NewsGator’s focus on its paying, enterprise-grade products makes a lot of sense. just yesterday, the company released an announcement about the momentum for its enterprise social networking product Social Sites, which recently hit the milestone of 1 million paying users. Earlier this year, we published an interesting interview conducted with JB Holston, Newsgator’s CEO, in which he explains their focus on enterprise RSS even if they never call it that themselves.

NewsGator has raised $39 million to date , mostly from Mobius Venture Capital and Masthead Venture Partners.

It allows groups to keep abreast of private updates using push technology without cluttering up e-mail. Similarly, I use SM2 everyday to monitor news about CrunchBase. Currently I get a daily e-mail, but it’d be nice if I could subscribe to a password-protected RSS feed.

On Monday, Marshall Kirkpatrick claimed enterprise RSS is dead–citing Newsgator’s continued infusion of cash as evidence the market is dead. Brad Feld responded with his thoughts on why enterprise RSS is alive.

Yesterday, I spoke with JB Holston, Newsgator’s CEO, and asked him for his thoughts:

You’re known for RSS readers–what problem do you want to be known for solving?

First, though our brand is associated with consumer RSS readers–FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, iPhone RSS reader–we never intended to build a consumer-focused product and flip it to Google. From the beginning, we were targeting the enterprise.

We want to be known for solving collaboration problems. We have social widgets, for example Reuters widgets use our technology. We also have a Social Sites application that basically turns Microsoft SharePoint into Facebook for the enterprise. [Screenshot below.]

Our enterprise RSS service has two sides: a Saas deployment used by approximately 150 vendors, and an on-premis server that sits behind the firewall–currently about 125 clients.

Why do you keep raising cash?

Newsgator was first funded four and half years ago–really, we’ve had three rounds of funding from separate groups. Technically it’s been six rounds, but only three events with different lead investors. So far we’ve raised $39 million.

This seems like a lot if we were just an iPhone developer (our iPhone application made TIME magazine’s top 10 list), but as I said before, we’re very focused on the enterprise. Raising $39 million is common in this space.

What’s your response on the death of enterprise RSS?

Who cares? It doesn’t have to be called enterprise RSS because that’s just the backend protocol. From our perspective, enterprise RSS–whether deployed for CMS, or portal enhancement, or social computing, or replaicing external information sources–is just the enabling technology.

Our customer’s don’t come to us and say “we want enterprise RSS”. They come with specific problems like “fix our portal”, “help us drive collaboration”, etc, and then we go use RSS. They don’t care how it happens.

From our point of view, the conversation has moved beyond RSS in the blogosphere. It’s a little startling to see people saying “because enterprise startups require cash, the enterprise RSS market is dead.”

RSS is fabulous technology, and if no one is talking about it, that’s just because the market matured to emphasizing solutions, not technologies.

It’s certainly an interesting argument, but I don’t think the market’s moved into understanding the power of enterprise RSS.

Maybe we’re just too stuck with bad inbox habits to worry about disentangling news from our inboxes. Certainly we’re just beginning to use online collaboration without having to think about it. Only time will tell how deeply RSS penetrates the enterprise.

This morning, NewsGator released a small batch of usage statistics for the free iPhone RSS aggregator NetNewsWire, a port of the OS X application of the same name.

According to the blog post by Josh Larson, NewsGator’s Community Manager, NetNewsWire has already seen over 200,000 downloads, 115,000 of which have signed up over the last 30 days.

On average, NetNewsWire for iPhone users subscribe to 26 RSS feeds. One crazy blacksheep out there somehow handles over 2,800 feeds, which is absurd – I only pull down a few hundred, yet things can already seem a bit torrential at peak times. 2,800 feeds would be mind boggling.

[Via TUAW]

NewsGator has decided to offer all of its RSS readers for free, including the newest versions of NetNewsWire, FeedDemon and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile. NewsGator Inbox, which has just been launched in public beta, will also be available for free.

When Nick wrote about NewsGators’ latest round of funding, he noted that NewsGator’s desktop feed readers can be preferable to web-based feed readers like Google Reader. Whereas web-based readers often suffer from a lag during which they fail to show a site’s most recent stories, NewsGator’s desktop readers tend to load up-to-the-minute stories from your favorite sites.

NewsGator will rely on revenues from its enterprise offerings going forward. The company will also increasingly record anonymous usage data in an effort “to help make decisions about what content [it believes] will be most relevant for you and for other users.”

Their RSS reader has been a personal favorite of the TechCrunch team. I use it over Google reader, which can lag behind in keeping my feeds up to date. They also have a mobile version.

Although we know the company best for the reader, NewsGator has also developed several other RSS related products. They have enterprise servers for syndicating information from the web to your employees, their own widget framework, and a host of personal products. Readers considering enterprise syndication services should check out our coverage of Attensa too.

Update: NewsGator CEO J.B. Holston adds:

Over 1 million folks rely on NewsGator daily – whether through FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, our mobile applications, our enterprise server at 12 of the Fortune 100 (and many more companies), or readers of over 50 sites who work with our content and widgets (USA Today, CBS News, etc etc).

He confirms that NewsGator’s main sources of revenues come from licensing its software to enterprises and monthly service fees from media and consumer-products companies. The new investment will go towards strengthening its position “in the enterprise RSS space,” and he expects this will get the company to a breakeven point on profits.

RSS reader NewsGator has released an iPhone version of their product today. Now when iPhone users log into m.newsgator.com, they will receive a free iPhone optimized version of the site custom tailored for the touch screen.

NewsGator Mobile for iPhone syncs with feeds across on all the existing NewsGator products, including NetNewsWire, NewsGator Online and FeedDemon.

They have existing paid clients for Java and Windows Mobile phones we covered previously. These clients include additional features such as clippings and offline reading.

Readers should also be familiar with the Google Reader skin developed by David Cann, soon after the release of the iPhone.

This version synchronizes with your online NewsGator account and caches articles for later, offline consumption. You can also send stories via email through the program’s interface.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch…

Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I’ve added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

800-Free-411

Jingle’s free 411 service has saved me a serious amount of cash this last year. They now account for over 3% of the U.S. market for information calls, and AT&T has announced that they are going to copy them. That’s good news for consumers, who have to pay up to $3.50 per 411 call today. Our coverage is here.

Amie Street

Amie Street, which launched in July, has a brilliant DRM-free music sales model. Bands upload music, which can then be downloaded for free by users. As songs become popular, the site starts to charge for it. They start at $0.01 and go up to $0.99. Users looking for popular new stuff go right to the more expensive songs. More adventurous types try out lots of new music. I’m somewhere in the middle. This free-market place to set the value of DRM-free digital music could be the future. Our coverage is here.

Ask City

Bloglines dropped off the list this year, but another Ask.com property, the recently launched Ask City, has been added. In our very subjective opinion Ask City has replaced Yahoo Maps as the best mapping product on the Internet. My favorite features are multipoint directions an the annotation tools that allow you to draw and write on a map before forwarding to friends. Ask City is less than a month old and it’s already one of our favorite apps. Our writeup is here.

BlueDot

BlueDot is a social bookmarking service that is similar to del.icio.us. I’ve started using it instead of del.icio.us becasue I like the interface better and it allows sharing of bookmarks just among friends, whereas with del.icio.us you have to choose between fully public and fully private bookmarks. The company launched in July and had an update in October.

Digg

Anyone who reads this blog knows my position on Digg, where users pick what news makes it to the home page. It’s the future of news, and the most disruptive force to mainstream media since blogs were born. Digg has to continue to battle spam while pleasing its most active users, which won’t be easy. But I use the Digg site every day. Our coverage of Digg is here.

Flickr

Flickr is our first holdover from last year’s list. In the last year we’ve seen a bunch of startups gunning for Flickr, but as of now it is still the photo tagging and sharing site that we use every day. The new geotagging feature is incredible. We’d like to see facial recognition, similar to what Ookles is doing, next. Our coverage of Flickr is here.

Flock

We’ve been fans of Flock since we first started covering it during the original Bar Camp in August 2005. It just feels like a complete ecosystem rather than the hodge podge of sometimes incompatible additional add-ons that you get with Firefox. If Flock didn’t exist I’d be a happy Firefox user, but it does, and I use it as my primary browser. The rumor is that they have a big new release coming very soon. Our coverage of Flock is here.

Gmail

Despite recent problems, I think Gmail is now at least as functional as most desktop email applications (like Outlook and Mac Mail), and darn close to perfect. The reason? Lots of storage, the ability to tag emails and the recent addition of POP access to other email accounts. All for the great price of – free.

NetNewsWire

I’ve used NewsGator’s NetNewsWire desktop feed reader from the moment I switched to a Mac in early 2006. It’s not free, but having fast and offline access to feeds was worth the $30 I paid for it. Bloglines dropped off the list because of NetNewsWire, although I expect to be moving over to Google Reader in the near future. Offline access is less important now that I have EVDO cellular access, and Google Reader made significant improvements to its product in its September upgrade.

Netvibes

Netvibes is another holdover from last year. We go there multiple times per day to get a quick overview of a few important feeds. The company continues to gain users at a torrid pace, and has plenty of money in the bank after a $15 million round earlier this year. My guess is Netvibes is fending off multiple acquisition offers at this point, and may not be an independent entity at the end of 2007. Our coverage of Netvibes is here.

Pandora

Pandora is yet another holdover from last year, and a company that we’ve covered since before its launch in 2005. My bet is that I’ve racked up more hours listening to music on Pandora than any other user – it’s almost always playing while I write. Millions of loyal users agree with me. Our coverage is here.

Skype

Skype may be the single biggest productivity booster since email. I use it as my primary instant messaging client, and of course for free on the fly calls almost daily. Skype is one of the Internet’s killer apps. Our coverage of Skype is here.

Techmeme

TechMeme is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. Stuff on TechMeme hits the New York Times and other newspapers days later. My father is as addicted to Techmeme’s political sister site, Memorandum, as I am to the technology news area. Our coverage of TechMeme is here and here.

WordPress

We’ve been mostly happy customers of WordPress since TechCrunch started. It’s the most flexible blogging platform, and their Akismet comment spam blocking service has saved us from nearly 1 million spammy comments. We’d have to hire a full time person just to moderate comments and trackbacks if Akismet wasn’t as good as it is. Our coverage of WordPress is here.

YouTube

YouTube is far from being a young startup, having been acquired by Google for $1.65 billion earlier this year. And even though they sent us a cease & desist letter just two months ago, we remain YouTube addicts. Fire Engines! Bananas! Humanity is a beautiful thing. Earlier YouTube coverage is here.

Almost on the List

A few companies almost made the list as well – AllOfMP3, AllPeers, Last.fm, Meebo, Wikipedia and Zoho were right on the edge, as well as others. I just had to cut the list off somewhere.

Agree? Disagree? Tell me all about it in the comments.

One of the best things about the product is that it will allow specific groups of feeds to be designated for sharing across devices via an interface in Newsgator Online. I moved to using NetNewsWire on my desktop when I grew frustrated with Newsgator Online’s inability to display more than a thousand feeds without choking, though the company tells me they’ve vastly improved the speed of the online version in recent months. One way or the other, I only want and need so many feeds on my phone. Newsgator Go! will also cache feed items locally on your phone so you can read them without going online.

Other options for reading your feeds on the go include Bloglines Mobile, the FeedBurner Mobile Feed Reader, the multi-featured mobile hydra Winksite, Dave Winer’s mobile River of News for select feeds and the forthcoming mobile tool suite SynapseLife.

There’s a screenshot of the Newsgator Go! interface posted at MobileCrunch.

Users will now be able to subscribe with one click to any page’s RSS feed in IE and Firefox, a feature that had made Bloglines the easiest online feed reader to use. The toolbar also displays the number of Newsgator subscribers to the feed, inbound links to the URL you are viewing, a feed preview and a search box to discover new feeds by keyword.

This is a very smart addition to the company’s offerings that I’m surprised took so long and I wish it was available for the Mac. One click subscribe is available in NetNewsWire, but the other features would be nice. If this were just a FireFox plug-in that would be ideal.

While Bloglines has long been the favorite feed reader for people looking for a simple but powerful tool, the new Newsgator toolbar means that users seeking many of these features now have options. Newsgator provides a river of news feature that Bloglines does not and handles OPML files much more gracefully. The search feature will probably not be as good, though, as the one at Bloglines – which is backed up by Ask.com and requires that Bloglines users are subscribed to a feed before it is displayed in search results in order to exclude splogs.

Newsgator is one of the leading RSS companies on the market. The company has provided white label solutions for NewsWeek, USAToday and many other companies. 15% of TechCrunch subscribers use Newsgator services, second only to FireFox Live Bookmarks at 27%. We last wrote about the company when it released a road map for the future of RSS.

Newsgator properties (including the Mac NetNewsWire) are the second most frequently used feed readers by TechCrunch subscribers according to Mike’s post on CrunchNotes – behind FireFox. I think the company’s roadmap speaks to the future of RSS syndication in general. What are the most recent innovations at Bloglines? Folding blog search into Ask.com and supporting flash inside the reader. The Newsgator next steps discussed in Reinacker’s post blow those away. I think that these are the features and issues that we’ll see from every other vendor in this space.

Highlights discussed below include:

• recommending feeds
• niche default subscription options
• social networking/comments about feeds
• RSS everywhere – where else can it go?
• feeds and podcasts by phone
• advertising, enterprise and private label possibilities.

Here’s my summary of and thoughts on the roadmap points.

• Reinacker says there are loads of features planned for the free online version of Newsgator, including “more interactive feed discovery mechanisms (based on the larger community of users and their subscriptions).” Bloglines leverages its users’ subscriptions heavily to eliminate blog search spam – searching only feeds that Bloglines users have subscribed to excludes junk splog feeds. Reinacker must be alluding here to something more proactive, probably recommended feeds determined by comparing your subscriptions to overlapping subscriptions by other readers. In other words, “you subscribed to WorldChanging, many other readers subscribed to this have also subscribed to GlobalVoicesOnline.” This type of thing is already a best practice in the social bookmarking space – it’s only logical to offer the same in RSS. ShareYourOPML is does this in the geek ghetto.
• “Completely different user interface paradigms (where a user could potentially select from different options, each catering to a different kind of user)”
  That likely means describing yourself as a certain type of user and being presented with default subscription options (an OPML file) based on your interests. It will be nice for people to be able to automatically access high quality feeds from more than just a few mass media verticals. I’d love to see an international news focus, an environmental focus, a science focus – why not? Newsgator already has the best OPML support of all the major online feed reader vendors, they should leverage that.
• De-emphasizing the term RSS feed. Reinacker says most people don’t want to see the acronym. I’m sure that’s true, and I’m all about making RSS usable by as many people as possible, but talk like that always makes me worry about decreased functionality. I hope that’s not the direction the system moves in.
• Rieneker writes about changing the way people discover feeds, adding value at the point of discovery and participating in a larger ecosystem of users. That’s social networking talk and there’s no reason given Newsgator’s large enterprise user base that feeds themselves can’t be commented on, recommended, etc. Look for Newsgator to present feeds more as objects in and of themselves; objects that contain dynamically updated information but are also identified by a static URL which can be commented on and related to in a wide variety of ways.
• The recently announced Newsgator plug-in for Yahoo! Messenger is highlighted as an example of “Newsgator everywhere”. Every major vendor in the online RSS reader space has a mobile version already – beyond the browser, the desktop, the mobile device and now IM where else could a feed reader go? What does Reinacker mean when he says that there’s more Newsgator everywhere to come? I can’t think of anywhere.
• Newsgator Mobile for Windows Mobile enabled phones launched recently, but Reinacker says that all java-enabled phones will be able to use Newsgator Mobile soon. Let’s hope it doesn’t choke on a large number of feeds – like Newsgator Online has for months. Reinacker also says the company will be offering mobile audio and video podcasting soon. That will be an important test of the podcast listening by phone paradigm – expected to be big down the road.
• Reinacker says the company has made a major commitment to the Newsgator API and improved analytics. I’ll make small mention of this here, but the implications could be big in terms of third party services. It could also mean more RSS advertising, which could be good or bad for users, depending on how it is implemented.
• On the Newsgator enterprise service, a big chunk of where the company makes its money, Reinacker says “There’s so much activity going on here, I’m not sure I can even do it justice.” Since TechCrunch isn’t an enterprise focused blog I’ll just refer interested readers to the second to last paragraph of Reinacker’s post. He mentions improved portal integration, group clippings (enterprise tagging?) and very small business tools. All to be seen in Japan first, US and Europe later in the year.
• Newsgator Private Label is one of the coolest parts of the Newsgator service. Newsgator MyUSAToday and Newsgator MyNewsweek may not be super exciting themselves, but think of the potential: a hosted community feed reader seeded with feeds selected by topical expert admin. Throw in a unique feed of items tagged as editor favorites on the community’s theme and you have a powerful online portal that’s super dynamic. Stay persistent though, I called the Newsgator sales line a while ago for a price quote on this (didn’t drop any organization names) and never heard back from them. This is big money for Newsgator and unfortunately their roadmap focus exclusively on advertising and PR possibilities for the future – though PR can be a good thing.

RSS is the foundation of almost everything Web 2.0 – isn’t it? It’s what makes blog readership scalable, podcasts subscribable, wiki changes watchable and so much more. If Newsgatgor can succeed in offering the kind of innovative features this roadmap alludes to, without falling into the trap of crass commercialism, Reinacker’s vision could be deeply influential for the future of the medium.

There are a number of different types of readers: web-based, desktop, Outlook based, etc… This post is focused solely on web-based feed readers. I’ve included the big guys plus some up and coming readers with outstanding features and/or performance like News Alloy, Gritwire, Attensa and FeedLounge.

All the web-based feed readers reviewed are free except for FeedLounge, which charges $5 per month.

The Web-based Feed Readers

I examined nine web-based feed readers (for previous reviews of each of these, see the TechCrunch Index):

• Attensa Online
• Bloglines
• FeedLounge
• Google Reader
• Gritwire
• News Alloy
• NewsGator Online
• Pluck Web Edition
• Rojo

I did not evaluate MyYahoo, the most widely used web-based reader, or similar products like Live.com, Google IG and Netvibes because these are more virtual desktop applications or portals with RSS reading built in. Heavy RSS users need a more industrial strength application like the ones I have listed above. I believe MyYahoo is a great option for a quick read of your feeds or for on the go feed readers viewing the Internet via cell phone or handheld device, but this service does not have the feature set for a heavy information consumer.

Researching these nine readers further underscores the extremely competitive atmosphere surrounding this industry’s development. On a feature-set basis only, two companies stood out: Rojo and Bloglines.

Google Reader and FeedLounge won my subjective feed-load test, which determines how well the application pulls up a particular feed. The test consisted of loading five feeds and taking the average of the load times and rating the reader on a five-point scale. Interestingly, FeedLounge is the only premium service of the group at $5 a month. Aside from the exceptional performance rating, I wonder what else sets FeedLounge apart from its free competitors. However, many users are religious about readers with a three pane display that FeedLounge, Attensa and Gritwire all offer.

Web 2.0 Features

Rojo, a San Francisco-based company which was reviewed previously on TechCrunch, has the most prominent web 2.0 swagger. News Alloy offers a close second though with itís tagging, rating and other content repositioning (i.e. add to Digg, add to del.icio.us).

User Ratings: Several of the readers offer rating systems, but I think Rojo’s “Mojo” is the most appealing. Mojo, a term reflecting user-generated reviews, mirrors a feature on the popular social news aggregator digg. After entering an item in the feed you can Mojo it to boost its relevance. NewsGator Online also offers a user generated content feature called “Latest Buzz,” which determines and displays the number of people linking to items in NewsGator. News Alloy employs a rating system similar to Rojo that tallies the number of times someone rates an item.

Tagging: Rojo generates a tag cloud from user-generated tags. Google Reader offers the same feature under a different name, “labels.” It seems FeedLounge uses tagging as the sole search and discovery mechanism. News Alloy also allows tagging of posts.

Social Aspects: Rojo and Gritwire feature “contacts,” which adds a social aspect to the reader, allowing a user to share information within a network of contacts.

Feed Discovery & Recommendations: Pluck, a Texas-based social media company, built a feature called FeedFinder into its Web Edition, which improves feed discovery. Rojo recommendations feeds in the top right corner of the layout while you browse.

Up and Coming Readers

Attensa, a Portland-based company, offers a reader that has a very professional and clean interface. While lacking many features the rest of the pack has, it pulls feeds up very quickly. In talking with Matthew Bookspan, Attensa’s Director of Product, I learned Attensa will be launching a new and improved version of the web-based reader that should fare better on the comparison chart. Additionally, Attensa will soon offer a mobile-enabled view of its reader, rendering nicely in handheld devices or cell phones.

Gritwire, a company based just north of Chicago, boasts a Flash-based feed reader that performs very well and offers integrated social networking features similar to Rojo. Gritwire uses a contact-list approach that allows you to share feeds among friends. I spoke with Ian Carswell, Gritwire’s co-founder and COO, who said Gritwire has more web 2.0 features in store, and I am curious to see them in action.

News Alloy, offers an Ajax driven reader with lots of power user bells and whistles. Though it underperformed in the subjective feed-load test Mike reviewed it previously on TechCrunch and found it to be extremely fast in other operations.

Feature Comparison Chart

The chart summarizes the research conducted in comparing these readers. I was not able to speak with every company directly so I may have missed some details. Consider this chart a living document to be updated if additional information becomes available. Also, I have left a number of competitors off this chart – there are so many web-based readers and I had to limit research to what I consider the main players in the field.

Summary

If you are looking purely for performance, Google Reader and FeedLounge are the fastest in our tests. Bloglines and Rojo are the best choice if you are looking for a feature rich application (and Rojo blows Bloglines away on “web 2.0″ type features).

None, however, yet approach the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

Editor’s Note: Frank Gruber, who writes the excellent blog Somewhat Frank, accepted our offer to write this research piece on TechCrunch. Thank you, Frank.

Update: March 31, 2006 (updates to chart)

Company: NewsGator

Founded: 2003. Acquired Feeddemon in May 2005.

What is it?

This profile reviews only NewsGator’s online product. NewsGator has a number of other popular products, including an Outlook product and the products offered by Feeddemon (recently acquired by NewsGator).

We will probably profile NewsGator’s other products soon. They’ve recently changed their pricing structure, and based on its complexity (and user feedback), we suspect things may be further simplified over time. Today, Nick Bradbury (Feeddemon founder) further changed pricing for his product.

The reason we like the Online edition is that it is not tied to a single computer. You can log in from anywhere. Also, Bloglines is the gold standard of web-based RSS readers, and it is natural to compare and contrast the two services (see our Blogines profile here)

Key Features of NewsGator Online:

- easy import of feeds opml file
- two pane interface – clippings, folders and feeds on the left, content on the right (similar to bloglines)
- alphabetizes feeds
- can view all feeds, or just feeds with new content
- fast updating
- great “clipping” tool to save content with one click
- sorting options includ by date, view older/newer first
- nascent search abilities

NewsGator v. Bloglines:

Bloglines has recently had significant delays in updating feeds – often updating only once a week. That means content comes infrequently and is stale – just the opposite of the core reason for using an RSS reader. Their site is also down quite often (who’s seen the infamous Bloglines Plumber recently?) They are the largest RSS reader (other than Yahoo) (Bloglines accounts for about 30% of Techcrunch subscriptions, NewsGator is a close second), but these problems are leading many users to try out other services.

However, even with its shortcoming, we find that NewsGator Online is not as good as Bloglines (but it’s close).

To test NewsGator, we imported our Bloglines feeds and used it exclusively for a few days. Importing was easy, thanks to the Bloglines export feature and the NewsGator import feature. Snafus are noted below.

Things NewsGator does better than Bloglines:

1. Feeds are updated much more frequently on NewsGator (a very, very important feature).

2. While both services have a “clippings” feature, we found NewsGator’s to be much easier to use – one click. Also, the clippings folder is added to the main directory on the left pane, whereas bloglines has an additional tab to click to view clipped items.

3. If you want a PC or Mac based desktop client, you have the ability to sync feeds with that client so you don’t read the same content twice (Bloglines doesn’t offer a desktop service).

4. NewsGator was never down during our testing period. Bloglines is down frequently.

Things Bloglines does better than NewsGator:

1. Both have two pane interfaces, but Bloglines allows scrolling of the left pane whereas NewsGator doesn’t. This means that you can peruse feeds without losing the content in the right pane. This seems like a small issue, but we found it really annoying when using NewsGator.

2. Bloglines has a “mark all read” feature that clears out all unread content. NewsGator doesn’t have this feature, meaning we had to click on each and every one of our 250+ feeds after importing the opml file to clear out old content. This was a one-time issue, but it certainly got us off on the wrong foot with regard to our NewsGator experience.

3. Both services alphabetize feeds. However, Bloglines disregards “the” before the feedname, and we found it difficult to find the feeds we were used to reading by the name we remembered them by.

4. Bloglines shows the number of subscribers for each feed, and you can view public subscribers. NewsGator doesn’t do this.

5. Bloglines allows you to view public subscriptions of other users (and add them to your own). NewsGator doesn’t have this feature. Bloglines also has a permanent URI for each subscriber’s public feeds. As an example, here are all of my personal feeds on Bloglines.

6. Bloglines has a “keep new” feature for each post that is useful. NewsGator has no equivalent feature.

7. Bloglines has a useful but little known about email feature – you can create an email address and all emails to that address show up as a feed in bloglines. It’s very useful for subscribing to newsletter type emails that you’d rather have in your RSS reader than your email inbox.

Things Both do well:

Both have great user interfaces, options to open content in a new window or the existing window, options for folders to group feeds and good customer service (inquiries about both were answered promptly, within 24 hours even over a weekend).

Neither service has tagging of content, something Rojo (Rojo profile) has, and we’d like to see further experiments in this area.

Summary:

To be honest, we could be happy with either one. But if forced to choose, we choose Bloglines based on features available today. If the feed updating issue isn’t worked out, however, or if we see that damn bloglines plumber more than once a month, things may change quickly.

NewsGator has a good track record of responding quickly to user feedback, and most of the blogines features mentioned here could easily be added to NewsGator.

Finally, we note that with the ease of opml exports of feeds, there is no real lock-in of users, and a newcomer with fresh ideas could easily and quickly gain real market share.

NewsGator Management:

J.B. Holston – CEO and President
Greg Reinacker – CTO and Founder
A.V. “Sandy�? Hamilton – EVP Sales, Marketing and Business Development
Mark Nass – VP of Finance and Administration
Link

Links:

About
Press
Support
NewsGator Blog
Greg Reinacker
Brad Feld on NewsGator Pricing
Nick Bradbury (Feeddemon Founder)
RSS Compendium Blog
Don’t Back Down (“Newsgator is again going on the back burner. Just too many things that don’t work right.”)
Momathome
knowledge jolt with jack
home office voice
Azizi Jennis
Useful Sounds (slow bloglines updates)
Leonid Mamchenkov
Otherwise engaged (bloglines origins)
Fanteja
feednation (a newcomer to think about as an option, with incredible tagging and search options)

Tags: newsgator, bloglines, feeddemon, rss, rssreaders, techcrunch, web2.0, feednation, rojo