Feb

20

FeedDemon vs. GoogleReader

February 20, 2008 |

For the last few days, I have been pondering a move away from GoogleReader and back towards FeedDemon. For somebody who writes about webapps as much as I do, that move must seem almost blasphemous. However, I have become more and more frustrated with the latency of Google’s feed reader. It can often take hours for posts to appear - even from blogs with hundreds of subscribers. If you are trying to write about breaking news, it just doesn’t help when it takes an hour and a half or three hours before you get to read a post.

Here is what I like about Google Reader:

  1. no worries about synching between machines
  2. Shared Feeds
  3. the way it handles link blogs
  4. endless scrolling and the fact that a post that has scrolled by is automatically marked as read
  5. simple, fast interface

What I don’t like:

  1. latency
  2. no option to filter feeds by keywords etc.
  3. latency…

What I like about FeedDemon:

  1. powerful filtering mechanisms (’watches’)
  2. lots of different layout options
  3. fast
  4. synchs with Newsgator and other machines
  5. updates feeds when I tell it to
  6. easy to create linkblogs
  7. ‘Popular Topics’: your own personal TechMeme based on the feeds you read

What I don’t like:

  1. no endless scroll, but pages
  2. doesn’t mark feeds read automatically, but only when you switch pages or feeds (depending on the options you set)
  3. linkblog isn’t recognized as such in GoogleReader and isn’t accepted by ReadBurner and RSSMeme (LinkRiver does accept it, though)
  4. doesn’t recognize linkblogs and hence shows items more than once
  5. online interface at NewsGator is nice, but doesn’t rival GoogleReader.

Because I enjoy keeping my linkblog groomed, I really don’t want to switch away from GoogleReader, but in the end, the advantages of using a desktop client just outway that. For the time being, I’m going to use the awkward approach of using GoogleReader to keep the linkblog going, but using FeedDemon for the doing the actual reading.

In the end, using a desktop client just gives me more flexibility and control than using a web app.


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2 Comments so far

  1. Steven Hodson on February 20, 2008 5:42 pm

    [Darth Vader] Welcome to the dark side my son [/Darth Vader]

    :)

  2. Glenn Slaven on February 20, 2008 6:24 pm

    FD doesn’t have endless scroll, but you can set the page size to 200, and with the crtl-d (mark page read & move to next page) shortcut, it’s pretty quick to navigate to the next lot of items.

    I would love to be able to sync with google reader, there is a forum post about that: http://forum.newsgator.com/Topic27420-51-1.aspx
    We’ll see if anything happens. It would be pretty awesome if they did, seeing as reader is their direct competitor

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