May 29

NewsGator

NewsGator - the RSS news aggregator for Outlook: Do you find yourself checking the same sites many times a day for updates? Ever wish the operators could be so nice as to email you when they add something? Well, now they can…sorta.

NewsGator is an add-in for Outlook that checks any RSS feeds you give it at a specified interval, then pops a little system tray icon telling you there’s new stuff out there.

Yes, I know aggregators aren’t new, but the Outlook integration of this one makes it act very much like email. The system tray icon pops like the email icon (more like the Windows Update icon, actually — a little voice bubble accompanied by a “pop” sound effect), and all the entries appear as post items in folders in Outlook. In effect, it’s just like getting an email.

There seem to be a few bugs. Since RSS feeds before 2.0 had no date or GUID value, I’m not sure how NewsGator is figuring out which posts are new and which it has downloaded already. Due to this, it gets a little confused now and again — it will tell me there’s new stuff when it just downloaded the same thing again. I get some duplicates too, and sometimes new things aren’t at the top of the list. Again, I think all of this will be resolved when people start migrating to RSS 2.0.

It’s not free — $29 after a 14-day trial. But the trial will get you hooked (since I installed it, there’s a bunch of sites I haven’t actually visited in 10 days). I may actually buy it. And I’m cheap.

by Deane   May 29, 2003 10:36 AM   |
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NewsGator

Comments

by Rob,   May 29, 2003 10:43 AM  

Do you know a good resource for RSS Feeds? I'm looking for a listing (site, url) of RSS feeds. I don't want to subscribe to a bunch of blogs, but CNN, Wired, CNet would be worth my time.

by Greg Reinacker,   May 29, 2003 10:50 AM  

Deane, you should only get duplicates when the post has changed in one way or another. Some of these changes may not be visible (whitespace changes, for example), but NewsGator will still pick them up. For some feeds (those that use the RSS 2.0 guid element) you can turn of the "treat modified posts as new" option for that subscription, and you'll never see any duplicates.

If you see behavior that you believe is a bug, please send email to support@newsgator.com, or post on the NewsGator forums - we'll get back to you pretty quickly.

by Deane,   May 29, 2003 10:53 AM  

http://www.newsisfree.com has thousands of them. Whenever you're on a site, look for the little white-on-orange XML icon.

by Greg Reinacker,   May 29, 2003 10:57 AM  

Rob, a good resource to find feeds is http://www.syndic8.com. There's also a filtered search against the same database at http://www.newsgator.com/feeds.aspx .

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