NewsGator

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

~ the last words ~

newsgator started in 2004 when greg reinacker took a personal outlook plugin he had written, called newsgator, and turned it into a company. the plugin let outlook read rss feeds in the same window where you read mail, which was a reasonable thing to want when rss was the only way to follow blogs and outlook was where you already spent your working day. the company grew from there into a full rss product line.

in early 2005 newsgator acquired feeddemon, the windows desktop rss client written by nick bradbury. in october of the same year it acquired netnewswire, the mac counterpart written by brent simmons. add the existing outlook plugin and a new web-based sync service called newsgator online, and by 2006 newsgator was the company that sold you an rss reader on whatever device you happened to be using, with a single account knitting it all together. for a brief window before google reader generalized the same idea for free, this was the cleanest way to read feeds across machines.

i used feeddemon during this stretch. by the late 2000s my home setup was a windows desktop on ttnet adsl, with about a hundred subscribed feeds running through feeddemon every morning. donanimhaber thread feeds and english tech blogs were the biggest chunk, the standard rss-era starter pack for a turkish engineering student. that the underlying sync was newsgator's was something i never thought about until it stopped working.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

google reader had launched in october 2005, the same month newsgator was buying netnewswire. for a while the two products coexisted because newsgator's clients were better and reader's web ui was prettier. by 2008 reader had a clear lead on the audience newsgator had been building. it was also free, and the company behind it was google. newsgator's executives had already noticed that the most valuable thing they had built was not actually rss reading but the social-collaboration layer they had bolted on top for enterprise customers. the company started moving its engineering toward that.

~ how it actually ended ~

in july 2009 newsgator announced it would discontinue the consumer side of newsgator online. on august 31, 2009 the web reader and its sync infrastructure went offline. the company suggested its users move to google reader for syncing, which was the direct admission of defeat the press write-ups noticed at the time. feeddemon and netnewswire kept working but lost their sync backbone, and were eventually handed back to their original authors. the company rebuilt itself around enterprise social plugins for sharepoint.

~ the long tail ~

in 2013 newsgator acquired a german company called sitrion and took the new name in 2014. the parent that had once owned feeddemon and netnewswire was now an enterprise collaboration vendor with a different brand. google reader itself died in july 2013, four years after newsgator pointed its users that way. on the desktop side feeddemon was discontinued the same year when nick bradbury moved on, while netnewswire eventually went open source in 2018 under brent simmons again and is still maintained. the empire fragmented into the people who had built it, which is roughly the better ending for a software company that started with one engineer's outlook plugin.

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