First Impressions: NewsGator Online Services

After my post yesterday, I decided I should give NewsGator Online Services a try.  When I checked out the online demo, I was thuroughly impressed with the different services they offer. I figured that it wasn't going to cost a thing since they had a 14-day free trial, so I signed up right away.  Once in, I noticed some sluggish performance, but I wrote that off as "first day jitters" and the popularity & use. 

So, I continued only to start setting up my "Premium Content".  The short listing of these really didn't impress me, but I signed up for 5 comic strips ... well I actually did the technology first, but that was a bunch of crap.  I sure hope to see more premium content in the future.

After the premium content, I just started playing around with the "Web Edition" ... again, a bit slow but it has sped up tremendously in the last 24 hours.  I wasn't as impressed with this side of things.  I wish that we could have more control over things like:

  • Time elapsed to retrieve new posts.
  • Deletion of individual posts, not just everything in a folder ... this doesn't make much sense.

The "Custom Feeds" or rather, "search for this phrase in news/blogs" was something really cool, however it looks like it just uses some sites search functionality, so I got back a bunch of random things for the phrase "excentrics world".

I have yet to use the "POP Edition" or "Mobile Edition", but I rarely want to read my blogs at home or somewhere else.  Maybe tonight I'll check out the "POP Edition" to see if its any good...the "Mobile Edition" however will have to wait for someone else, unless I want to crack out my iPaq in about a year.

Overall impressions - its a very nice slick interface, and has very good potential.  I'm thinking the $5.95 for the Lite version may be a little steep, but if you used all the editions and had multiple computers (which I dont), it may be worth the money.  I guess the good thing is, if after 13 days I really don't like it, I can cancel my account and not get charged for anything.  What are your impressions?

2 Comments

  • Thanks for posting this! Just thought I'd leave a couple of comments.



    Re the performance early yesterday - we had some problems on Monday morning with the database, and everything (especially the web edition) came to a crawl. It appears that everything is working better now (as you've seen), and we're monitoring it closely to make sure it doesn't happen again.



    Premium content - we're aggressively working with potential partners to add additional content, and we have some pretty exciting deals in the works. I can't say anything more now, but stay tuned over the next few months.



    Individual post deletion - definitely necessary, it just didn't make the cutoff for the launch date. I would hope we'll have this in there soon.

  • I'm a bloglines user now but curious how it compares to new Newsgator Web edition. Anyone know how they compare?

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