17
May
2005
|
01:03 AM
America/Los_Angeles

A chat with FeedDemon developer Nick Bradbury about his company's acquisition by NewsGator

By Richard Koman


Originally published on ionRSS.com


Feed Demon.gifAt the Syndicate conference this morning, I sat down with Nick Bradbury to talk about NewsGator's acquisition of his company, Bradbury Software, which makes the popular FeedDemon desktop RSS aggregator. I asked him why he made this deal.


"The biggest request I've received from FeedDemon users is the ability to synchronize feeds between different computers. I had done limited integration with NewsGator and Bloglines but really limited. I realized I would need to partner with someone, because synchronization really has to be server-based."

Nick said he wasn't really familiar with NewsGator's strategy until he read Greg Reinacker's post on NewsGator's platform roadmap. He remembers telling his wife that on the basis of that blog entry, he was "really impressed" with NewsGator. It was only a few days later that Nick received email from Greg suggesting they talk about acquisition. "If I hadn't read that post, I probably would have turned it down."


Nick noted the NewsGator wasn't the first offer he's had - but it's the first that allows FeedDemon to grow as a product, rather than being stripped down for parts to be added to someone else's.


Nick showed me a pre-alpha version of a version of FeedDemon that is integrated with NewsGator. The integrated version lets you move back and forth between FeedDemon, NewsGator's Outlook plug-in and NewsGator's web-based aggregator. All three apps know which feeds you're subscribed to and which posts are read and unread. In this scenario, FeedDemon is a UI on top of NewsGator. You're reading feeds in FeedDemon but they're coming through NewsGator, a scenario that allows for the cross-app awareness of subscriptions and read entries.


While Nick concedes he's not really an enterprise kinda guy, he's excited about the chance to build FeedDemon into the app he wants it to be, and NewsGator's server-side approach makes that possible. Indeed the deal means "FeedDemon will be around for a long time," he said.


In the more distant future, Nick said that RSS aggregators will let you discover feeds and items you're not already subscribed to, and inform you about items that people are discussing.