Why Upgrade to FeedDemon 3, why not just Use Google Reader?

With the new versions of FeedDemon, NetNewsWire for Mac and NetNewsWire for iPhone now available, they have officially ended online news reader access and NewsGator synchronization. They have announced Google Reader as their sole synchronization platform, and have dropped NewsGator Online Reader as of 28th September 2009.

But was this the best thing to do? I most certainly think that one needs to pay attention to certain the conditions which played a major role in causing this shift. But before we find out the reason for this sudden shift, let me give you some insight over the new features of Feed Demon 3.0

I mentioned in FeedDemon 3.0 features review that if you are still using Feed Demon 2.7 this requires an upgrade to Feed Demon
3.0 to update and read your new feeds.

To find out what exactly happened during the transition towards version 3.0, you can read what our friends from TidBITS had to say about this.

But nonetheless the sudden change initially, seemed to cause a lot of irritation amongst its user base. But we all have to understand that while dealing with the internet, change is the name of the game and we have to be flexible in dealing with situations and economic realities. Providing a free service for a long time might not have been the most feasible thing to do.

FeedDemon 3.0 now runs ads at the bottom left of your screen.

There have been unhappy users reporting; for those who have used the paid version in the past, the new 3.0 version doesn’t offer any significant improvement over 2.7. The social media integration capabilities comes as a boon but the fact that it runs ads actually makes it worse.

My question is: Given all of this, why use FeedDemon 3.0? Why not just use Google Reader?

The answer that i can think of is fairly simple. There are many users who like the ability to read their feeds offline. This is FeedDemon’s biggest advantage. And while reading offline, the small ad at the bottom of the page is actually unobtrusive.

For those of you concerned about or were unaware of this development you can also read the News Gator FAQ for more info.

Feed Demon 3.0 is a free download for Windows systems only.