From Greg Reinacker we find out that Newsgator Acquires FeedDemon and Nick Bradbury confirms this in his post NewsGator Acquires FeedDemon, TopStyle...and Me!. I think this is a great acquisition for Newsgator. Acquisitions are usually about getting great people, key technology or lots of users. With this acquisition Newsgator gets all three although it'll be interesting seeing how they manage to deal with rationalizing the existence of two desktop clients even if one of them is a Microsoft Office Outlook plugin.

I think this will have an interesting ripple effect on the aggregator market. Both Nick & Greg have already raised the bar for RSS readers to include synchronization with a web-based aggregator. Desktop aggregators that don't do this will eventually be left in the dust. So far Newsgator Online and Bloglines have been the premiere web-based aggregators but its been difficult building applications that synchronize with them. Newsgator Online doesn't seem to have any public documentation about their API while the Bloglines API is not terribly useful for synchronization.

This definitely puts pressure on Bloglines to provide a richer API since two of the most popular desktop aggregators on the Windows platform will now have a richer synchronization story with its most notable competitor. It also puts pressure on other desktop aggregators to figure out a strategy for their own synchronization stories. For example, I had planned to add support for synchronizing with both services in the Nightcrawler release of RSS Bandit but now it is unclear whether there is any incentive for Newsgator to provide an API for other RSS readers. Combining this with the fact that the Bloglines API isn't terribly rich means I'm between a rock and a hard place when it comes to providing synchronization with a web-based aggregator in the next version of RSS Bandit.

Sometimes I wonder whether my energies wouldn't be better spent convincing Steve Rider to let me hack an API for http://www.start.com/1. :)