NewsGator Online update

ByCarlos Granier

NewsGator Online, the online RSS service I’ve been trying out lately, seems to be down at the moment. I’ve been using it exclusively for the past week, and have pretty much stopped using Bloglines, my previous free online RSS service. Basically NewsGator has a more pleasant UI and feels a bit quicker.

They also seem to be quite good at harvesting positive comments whenever they pop-up on blogs. The more constructive criticisms, however, seem to be ignored.(*) And they better get on to fixing the user experience sooner than later – it’d much easier for Bloglines to make their website more pleasant since they already have most of the features in place.

So, NewsGator, listen up:

1. Stability – get the service running 24/7.
2. Usability – enough of the auto-collapsing folders. If I’m looking at stuff inside a folder, don’t close the whole folder just because I’m done with a sub-folder.
3. Integration – look at Bloglines’ integration with Firefox and shamelessly copy it.

Also, the way I use NewsGator right now is this: If I see a post I find interesting I open it in another tab (Bloglines lets you select this automatically). I have the Super DragAndGo Firefox extension, so I simply drag-and-release the post title and it open in another tab. I then go to the tab and if it’s something interesting I’ll e-mail to my friends using the GMailIt bookmarklet on my Firefox toolbar. This way I have complete access to my address book and keep a copy of the article.

It’d be great if Google came up with a NewsGator/Bloglines competitor that integrated with my GMail account. I know I can use NewsGator/Bloglines to send posts to my friends, but it’s just not the same.

(*) UPDATE: NewsGator does listen to our suggestions and criticisms. Since the service seems to be down at the moment (I can’t get any of the feeds to display on the right), I went clicking around and found they did fix the problem with organizing feeds into folders. You can now do this very easily and intuitively. Well done NewsGator! They’ve also added a favicon, but although it displays nicely on the address bar and the bookmark, it’s not showing on the tab like all the others do.

Comments from original posting of this article (on my previous blog):

As you noted in your later post, most of these items have been addressed. On the stability thing – do you happen to remember the date/time you noticed the service was not available? I’d like to check the logs to see what happened.

We’re definitely committed to keeping this running 24/7 – but I’ll be the first to admit we’ve had a couple of growing pains along the way. From what I can recall, we’ve probably had about 60 minutes of prime-time downtime since the re-launch a couple of weeks ago…which doesn’t sound too bad on the surface, but in my mind is definitely not acceptable. We’re working on it!

Posted by: Greg Reinacker | November 2, 2004 10:58 AM

Greg, I believe the problem with the service had to do with last night’s upgrade. It’s working fine now and very fast. Thanks for listening to all our rants & raves.

Posted by: carlos | November 2, 2004 11:04 AM