NewsGator yesterday began making their desktop RSS readers available for free. This includes:
The question that everyone is asking themself is, "Does anyone want to use a desktop feed reader?" I personally am a long time user of Netvibes and a new user of Google Reader. Both of these being online feed reading applications.

Despite being a big fan of both of these online applications, they have their own 'quirks' which make them annoying for me to use. Most of these issues revolve around keyboard navigation, bugs in the feed history, and duplicate feeds. Most of these issues beautifully disappear in NetNewsWire, the Mac client from NewsGator which I downloaded for the first time yesterday.

Despite the fact that for at least the foreseeable future, NetNewsWire is my preferred feed reader, I can't see it lasting. The reason I like NetNewsWire is because it's less buggy then its online competitors and more feature rich. It's only a matter of time however before Netvibes works the bugs out, adds some more features, and again becomes my preferred reader.

I wish the NewsGator folks luck, however I can't see how they hope to compete with online equivalents in the long run.