FeedDemon

» see feeddemon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

rss reading, for me, meant google reader in a browser tab. FeedDemon was the desktop app i kept reading about and never paid for. It was a Windows program, and by the time i had feeds worth following i was already living inside the web version that Google gave away for free. But for a certain kind of reader in the middle 2000s, FeedDemon was the thing, the serious tool you bought because you took your subscriptions seriously.

Nick Bradbury made it in 2003. He was already known for two other Windows apps that web people used, so FeedDemon arrived with trust attached. It gave you a three-pane view and a way to move through hundreds of blog posts a day without losing your place. In an era when everyone with a blog also had a blogroll, that mattered.

NewsGator bought it in 2005, and for a while FeedDemon and Google Reader coexisted, the paid desktop client and the free cloud one, syncing to the same place so your read state followed you between them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

the problem was the word "syncing to the same place." FeedDemon had leaned on Google Reader to keep your unread state consistent across machines. That was convenient right up until it was fatal. When you build your product on top of a free service from a giant, you are betting the giant stays interested, and Google did not stay interested in reading.

~ the day it died ~

on 13 March 2013 Google announced that Reader would shut down that July. Within days Bradbury announced the end of FeedDemon in a short post that read like someone turning off a light in a room he had lived in for ten years. He shipped one last version in June, free, with every paid feature unlocked and no ads, a version that no longer needed Google's sync so it would keep working after Reader went dark.

~ what got buried with it ~

the death of FeedDemon and Google Reader in the same season is remembered as the moment desktop rss stopped being a mainstream habit. The feeds did not disappear. The idea that a normal person would sit down and read a hundred blog posts a day, in order, from an app they chose on purpose, mostly did.

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