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Thursday, January 10, 2008

NewsGator’s RSS clients are now free!

image Greg Reinacker, founder and CTO of NewsGator Technologies, Inc., has announced yesterday about new releases of most popular applications: FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 (beta), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. Each of these is a pretty major release on its own - tons of new features in all of them.

NewsGator also announced that all of its client RSS reader products are now available free of charge and include free synchronization along with other services. Users can now enjoy the great features and performance of all of NewsGator’s Web, desktop and mobile readers for iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry (powered by FreeRange), all synchronized to provide the same view of their RSS content no matter when or where they read it. Enterprise customers will continue to enjoy the extended value of having all these clients synchronize with NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES). The combination of innovative client reader features and the ability to leverage core platform data and capabilities have made NewsGator products dominant in the enterprise.

“It’s all about ubiquity,” said Greg Reinacker. “We have more than 100 Fortune 2000 companies using NewsGator Enterprise Server and our client products. In selling to these enterprises, we discovered that thousands of knowledge workers were already using one or more of our client products and we learned that we could drive the relevance of everyone’s experience by using the community’s anonymous content consumption patterns throughout the system. In general, we found that the more people that used our system, the more relevant we could make the product for each user. By making it easier for knowledge workers to use our clients we dramatically increase the size of our user community. Enterprises that then deploy our server can take advantage of the synchronization and increased relevance for every user supported by the system. Likewise, we can extend these capabilities to our online platform, which currently serves well over 1 million consumers and indexes 7 million new articles per day. The result is tremendous value and continued innovation for both consumer and enterprise users.”

"I haven’t been this excited about our consumer products and strategy since we bought FeedDemon and NetNewsWire a couple of years ago."

The reson behind this is as said by the Greg, "What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients. 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. Using a Mac at home, along with an iPhone? NetNewsWire and our iPhone reader will sync up. Have a PC at the office? FeedDemon will sync with your other two applications. And they’ll all sync with NewsGator Online. It all just works.

There are two reasons we want our clients to become ubiquitous. Well, three if you count “we want to be nice.” But two other reasons.

First, we’ve found that when we go into an enterprise to sell NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) and Social Sites, there are already a ton of people using one of our desktop apps already. The more folks are already using them, the easier it is to sell our server products - especially since these client apps can sync with NGES directly. So, the more the merrier - we’re going to make sure that everyone who wants to use our apps can do so, without having to climb over the hump of having to dig out their credit card.

And second, we want to collect “attention” data (actually I like to call this activity data, but everyone else in the world calls it attention) and use it to make everyone’s experience better. If there is a specific feed you love, and you’re constantly emailing its articles to friends or saving articles in your clippings, that’s interesting…and if there are a lot of people doing this, it’s probably a good indicator about the “relevancy” of that content for other users. Similar with individual articles that are getting a lot of attention from users. Basically, by using your data, in combination with aggregate data from other users, we can deliver a better experience for everyone. And that’s a good thing - both for us and for you.

We’ve taken some small steps along these lines so far in the client applications - watch over the next few months as these capabilities really start to come into their own, and roll out both in the online reader and continue to evolve in the clients.

We’ve talked about APML in the past, and said we’d implement APML export in the clients. We’re going to take that a step further - and implement an endpoint in our online platform where you (and only you!) can always access your personal APML data. That data will be a rollup of all of your activity across all of our clients that you use. We’re also going to make aggregate data available via API. You should start to see all of this start rolling out within the next couple of months."

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