Don't Back Down

Brian Livingston published an article last week that talks about picking the best online RSS reader. I can't believe it, because his first place reader is My Yahoo!, which he nearly dismisses with a wave of his hand by starting off "If you absolutely have to have to have stock quotes and local weather...". That's a back-handed compliment if I've ever heard it.

As a follow-up, he recommends that if you want to be able to "scale up" from a single user to a multinational enterprise, you should pick Newsgator. Huh? While I don't dispute it - and think that Newsgator might be fine - what happened here?

Earlier in the article, Brian goes into detail on the number of services offered by Bloglines, saying in a headline that they "Zoom Ahead". Apparently this is just for us geeks, and others should stick with Newsgator. Let's just go with that for a minute.

This article talks about using browser-based readers. Yet the only point that he really makes against Bloglines is that it doesn't support automated podcast downloads - a feature truly only available through Newsgator. Oh, and their client-side subsidiary, FeedDemon. Now Nick's a nice guy, and I really don't have anything against Newsgator.

But no matter how nice he is - how can his client-side solution give the win to a browser-based service? That just makes no sense. To delve further, Bloglines offers what Livingston calls a "universal inbox". I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I use the email functions of Bloglines regularly. Bloglines offers unlimited free searches. Newsgator gives you three for free. I don't have anything against services that require you to pay for them, but come on - you're writing an article to the public, and you enocourage a browser-based product that is better because of a client-side piece, doesn't offer as many features as other services for free, and can't even keep up in terms of market share?

I like Brian's columns, but this one is off. Way off.

Update: Nothing against Pluck, who seems to have a decent product coming along. But the column didn't mention them, so they weren't really relevant to this rant. Sorry guys.