Life is grand

If competing with a popular, well-designed product is tough, competing with a popular, well-designed product that happens to be free (while remaining fully-funded) is damned near impossible. And that’s unfortunate, because ultimately, it’s likely to lead to stagnation. The developers at NewsGator have done great work, but the more minds there are attacking a problem in different ways, the more great solutions we see.

While I agree with Rogue Amoeba that a free FeedDemon and NetNewsWire is bad for people making desktop feed readers I disagree on the stagnation front.

FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are arguably the best desktop feed readers in the current market. They do everything you expect from a feed reader, do them easily and do them fast.

But we have barely scratched the surface of feed readers. Innovation in feed readers has been stagnant for a good year or more. Our current feed reader model is a copy of an email reader with a few extra bits tailored to feed reading. Web-based readers are also rather stagnant, adding in features from other software and websites.

We can expect a lot more out of feed readers, a complete break from 3-pane reading and the “1034 unread items in 500 feeds” concept.

So hopefully the news that we can’t compete with NewsGator anymore will force us out of our comfort zone and bring about innovation in feed readers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.