I've been exchanging e-mails with a fellow SharePoint MVP who works for Newsgator muttering about the Newsgator Online service having abandoned its "Classic" look and gone completely with their "faster" (= not for me) Beta version. A couple of days ago he advised me to go to http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/Default.aspx and sign up for both Feed Demon for my Vista portable and NetNewsWire for my Mac, both of which had become free to use (as Newsgator Online always was).

My counter for that was that the reason I was using Newsgator Online was because I could switch machines (including work machines) when using that because things I'd read on the Vista machine (or work machine) were no longer visible on the Mac (and vice versa). He assured me that there would be synchronization between Feed Demon and NetNewsWire so I thought I'd give them a try.

Having first thought I was on the Mac (which shows how Tiger and Vista can have a similar feel to them - but probably more likely just shows I wasn't properly awake [I had both the Mac and the Vista switched on as the Mac was running my WSS 3.0 site but was actually using the Vista machine]) I finally stopped wondering why NetNewsWire didn't want to install and instead installed Feed Demon.

I had of course the standard "do you want us a) to give you some sample feeds b) no feeds c) import some feeds and I decided to import my many existing feeds from Newsgator Online by doing an Export to OPML and using that file to import into Feed Demon. I then spent a good 15 mins going through all the options in Newsgator Online only to find that in this beta look (now the only one you have) you CAN'T export your feeds to an OPML file. You can Import but that was of no use to me.

So I was left with the choice of no feeds or give me some sample feeds. A toss-up really, but I went for "some sample feeds" and was somewhat amazed to find that the sample feeds it had generated were in fact my Newsgator On-line feeds. Unfortunately with a lot of additional rubbish as well, but still.

So I was happy - or was I ?

I was until I went back to Newsgator On-line and found that it too had miraculously acquired all those other rubbish feeds from Feed Demon.

So as a result and rather sooner than expected I'm going to have to spend the next hour or so removing all those rubbishy feeds from Feed Demon (or Online?) so that I can use one of these things without that baggage.

In fact, on second thoughts (isn't it a good thing I decided to write this blog article as otherwise I wouldn't have thought about it) I'm going to install the Mac NetNewsWire first and then remove the rubbishy feeds - otherwise no doubt I'm going to have to do that all over again.

In the long run of course this synchronization among the three products is a real boom - I'll probably only use Newsgator On-line in future when in Internet Cafés (= never or rather hardly ever)

P.S. The NetNewsWire implementation was awful. (Looked nice but was a pig to use sensibly) so I was forced to remove it from the machine completely (as even URLs to forum messages entered into Safari were being opened there rather than in Safari so I could only read them and not reply to them).