It seems I missed the news when this happened last week but according to Greg Reinacker’s post NewsGator’s RSS clients are now free! 

We’ve got a lot of big news today at NewsGator.

First, we’ve got new releases of our most popular applications: FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 (beta), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. Each of these is a pretty major release on its own - tons of new features in all of them.

But second, every one of those applications is now free! Free as in beer, that is. And add to the free list NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry as well. And not only are they free, but our online services (including synchronization) are now free as well! Not to mention our iPhone reader, HTML mobile reader, and all of the other applications that are part of our online platform.

According to Greg and Nick Bradbury, the reason they are doing this is because the bulk of their profits/revenues come from selling Enterprise licenses and the desktop readers are now being used as advertising to get enterprise customers.

They also mention that the other reason they are giving away their desktop application is that they see a lot of financial value from collecting information about what feeds their users are reading. My assumption was that this is because the demographic data is being resold to marketers although both Greg and Nick make it seem like the collection of this data is benign and only used for end user facing features. 

Anyway, this is pretty great news for fans of desktop RSS readers. If I didn’t already have RSS Bandit, FeedDemon would be my first choice when it comes to a desktop RSS reader for Windows. I also like the fact that we get a shout out as part of the setup experience for FeedDemon which is shown below

Thanks for the shout out Nick.

Now that these apps are free, it does encourage us to step our game up with RSS Bandit. Right now, my thinking is that official version number for the release currently codenamed Phoenix will be RSS Bandit 2.0. This release will be deserve the monicker “2.0” for two reasons

1. The user interface will be completely rewritten from scratch by Oren and Torsten using WPF.
2. The application will become capable of being a full-blown desktop client to both Google Reader and NewsGator Online.

If I seem to have been blogging less, it is because I’ve been spending more time reading about code, thinking about code and writing code in my free time. I can’t wait to get the first beta out to you guys in a few months.

Now playing: Kid Rock - Welcome To The Party (Ode 2 the Old School)