NewsGator consumer products now all free–now you have no excuse not to use them

I have been a huge fan of NewsGator products for years.  I actually bought, yes bought, NewsGator for Outlook (now Inbox).  If you know me, you know that I rarely buy software.  A lot of commercial stuff just isn’t worth the price when free alternatives abound.  Not the case with NewsGator, it has always been worth it, imho.  I stopped using NG for a while, and after a flirtation with other clients, I settled down with FeedDemon (now on v. 2.6, released today).  When I saw today on Greg Reinacker’s blog that all the NG products are now free, my first though was "now people don’t have any excuse not to use the best RSS clients out there":

We’ve got a lot of big news today at NewsGator.

First, we’ve got new releases of our 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.

But second, every one of those applications is now free! Free as in beer, that is. And add to the free list NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry as well. And not only are they free, but our online services (including synchronization) are now free as well! Not to mention our iPhone reader, HTML mobile reader, and all of the other applications that are part of our online platform. Source: NewsGator’s RSS clients are now free! - Greg Reinacker’s Weblog - Musings on just about everything.

Yep, I really mean that.  I have FeedDemon and NewsGator Go! on my Berry, and it all syncs in with NewsGator online.  Yes, I know, people love Bloglines and Google Reader.  Sure, I did too, but I got fed up with GR not updating feeds quickly and not really having a lot of the power features I wanted.  That and when I was offline, I couldn’t read feeds.  Well FeedDemon handles all of this nicely…

NewsGator products have been doing some great things in the APML space as well … this is a very cool aspect of their products.  Building attention data across so many people, yes you can opt out, has so much cool potential for getting new perspectives on the news.

Reading through some of the reactions, Mashable flows my "yippee!" tack, Kevin Burton looks at the huge value the attention data offers us (I can’t wait to learn how to leverage it).  Web Worker Daily and R/WW both wonder if this move will change anything in the RSS market, not to mention the questions about attention data privacy.  R/WW is running a poll and the results at this moment suggest that desktop clients have the potential to surge:

Given that according to their post when they ran the poll a year ago, only 18% of readers used an offline client.  Sure this is early in the poll, but …

Kudos again to the whole NG team on this bold move!  I’m looking forward to future developments!

BTW, if you’d like to subscribe to my shared feed items, here is the feed via NewsGator Online and FeedDemon.

Update: I just checked the R/WW poll and the results haven’t changed much looks like lots of folks have either switched to desktop readers or NewsGator’s free offering is working.  Also if you haven’t read Nick Bradbury’s post on why use a desktop reader…you should.  Great reading and great advice.