I know that I have written a lot about FeedDemon but that’s what happens when you are a fan of product – you want to tell everyone just how much you like it. Such is the case with FeedDemon. I have been using the RSS client for a long time and it is probably one of the few programs you would have to take from my cold dead hands before I would give up on using.
In this day of Twitter, Facebook and all other kinds of fancy social media tools some consider RSS and RSS reader clients – especially desktop clients – to be either dead or dying. I tend to think just the opposite – I think RSS and the clients we use will have a long life.
With that in mind I decided to approach Nick Bradbury, the developer behind FeedDemon, and see if he would be willing to answer a few questions about RSS and FeedDemon. As you can see below he was more than willing to do so and for that I thank him very much.
And with that on with the interview.
1. There is a lot of talk about RSS being dead. What is your general reaction to this kind of discussion and has it impacted the use of FeedDemon in anyway?
I was about to enter this discussion several weeks ago with a blog post titled, “If RSS is dead, then the web must be full of necrophiliacs.” But I decided to stay out of it since Fred Wilson summed up the whole thing better than I could when he said:
“When you read a post that says ‘XYZ is killing ABC’, I suggest you see it for what it is, a lame attempt to get pageviews because the author had nothing interesting to contribute on the topic.”
It’s hard to say whether it impacted the use of FeedDemon, but I have to point out that many people kept up with the “debate” via their RSS reader.
2. In the same vein with the increasing use of social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have you seen a decrease in the use of FeedDemon?
I don’t think these social services have led to a decrease in the use of FeedDemon, but they’ve certainly led to a change in how some people use it.
I know a lot of people use the latest version of FeedDemon to keep up with multiple Twitter and Facebook streams, and for some customers that’s more important than keeping up with the blog world – especially since bloggers tend to be less prolific now that they can share bite-sized ideas through Twitter.
3. I know that when NewsGator bought FeedDemon that the decision was made to make it free to use and then at some point during the v3.0 development cycle there was a decision made to make it ad-supported. This created some upset users (to put it mildly) while others, including myself, had no problem with it. Can you perhaps enlightening FeedDemon users as to the reasoning that went on through this whole process of going free and then going to ad supported?
There are a number of reasons FeedDemon became free, but as we said at the time, a big motivator was to get more people using FeedDemon to “spread the word” about NewsGator’s enterprise offerings. Charging for FeedDemon was preventing that to some extent, since so many people are used to getting software for free.
And I’m sure another reason was because we lost the web-based RSS reader competition. Google Reader became the de facto web-based reader, and since it was free it was hard to compete on the desktop with for-pay readers that synched with a less popular web-based reader.
Making FeedDemon ad-supported 18 months later wasn’t something we’d planned on, and I wasn’t very warm on the idea at first. I wasn’t about to pollute my hard work on FeedDemon’s UI by throwing in flashy, obnoxious ads. But I came around after we found an ad network that prided itself on tasteful, non-intrusive, well-designed ads which didn’t require violating the customer’s privacy.
What we haven’t mentioned before (yes, you’re reading it here first) is that I’m no longer employed by NewsGator. FeedDemon remains a NewsGator-branded product, but I’m 100% in charge of it now, and I’m once again an indie developer. FeedDemon is my sole focus – and my sole source of income. Given that so many people find the idea of paying for software to be alien, having ads ensures that I can earn a living.
4. Late in the development cycle you changed two integral parts of FeedDemon that I imagined cause the developer in you a lot of development grief. The first was switching the data storage for the program to using SQLite and the second was deprecating the NewsGator online syncing service in favor of using Google’s API for GReader. Regarding the first change could you give us an idea of the why’s and what it will let you add to the program. Then with the change to the Google Reader API why was this done and what potential does it bring to FeedDemon.
Yeah, making both of these changes in the same release required a ton of work and a lot of sleepless nights – it was like trying to build a brand new foundation for your house without breaking anything above-ground.
The switch to SQLite was a huge, hair-pulling architectural change, but it had been needed for quite some time. Way back when I created FeedDemon 1.0, I made the bone-headed decision to use XML as the storage format. The main reason I did that was to make sure that data was stored in an open format so customers wouldn’t feel locked into FeedDemon simply because it kept their data hostage in some proprietary format.
But XML turned out to be FeedDemon’s Achilles’ heel. Don’t get me wrong – XML is fine for data exchange. But for storing a non-trivial volume of data, it’s terrible. It’s too bulky, too performance-intense to parse, and too hard to query efficiently. Switching to SQLite enables FeedDemon 3.0 to store far more data, process it much faster, perform queries that would take forever with XML, and still keep everything in a non-proprietary format.
FeedDemon’s ties to NewsGator Online were another big problem. As I mentioned earlier, we basically lost the web-based RSS battle to Google Reader. More and more customers who wanted to use a desktop reader wanted one that synched with Google Reader, not NewsGator Online.
Making the switch was tricky since the GReader API is vastly different from the NewsGator API. Plus, GReader’s API is unpublished, so I had to spent many hours in front of an HTTP sniffer figuring out how it worked, and many more figuring out how to get it to work in FeedDemon.
I think the end result is worth it, though. FeedDemon 3.0 is far more powerful than previous versions, and it’s built on a foundation that enables taking FeedDemon beyond where “traditional” desktop readers can go. I’m especially pleased that the Google Reader team is bringing more social features to their product (something I’ve been dying to do in FeedDemon for years, but lacked the web-based backend for).
5. This is a question from Ruud Hein on Twitter and relates to the Google part of my last question. “Does switching to Google Reader feel like you ‘lost”? “
It feels like we lost the web-based RSS reader competition, but we’d already lost that. On the desktop, I feel like we’ve won by switching to Google Reader.
6. Your friendly competitor Dare Obasanjo has included support for Facebook in RSS Bandit – are you considering doing the same in FeedDemon?
Of course – but I make it a practice not to announce anything before I’ve coded it, so that’s all you’ll get from me
7. A couple of technical questions via Ruud Hein on Twitter – “Will FD ever support an “always” archive? ” and “Will FD get an option to export the content it holds?”
Tagged and starred items remain archived indefinitely, but I don’t imagine I’ll ever add the ability to say “keep all of this feed’s content forever.” I designed FeedDemon to be an RSS reader which assumes stuff you’ve already read usually isn’t important. That said, you can keep an archive of the most recent 2500 items in each feed if you really want to.
You can already export FeedDemon’s data. You can export your subscriptions as OPML or APML, or you can export entire newspapers (feed content) to HTML. And since FeedDemon uses SQLite for storage, you can access it using any tool that reads SQLite databases.
8. I realize that FeedDemon is developed using Delphi rather than the .NET framework but will we see any changes in the user interface along the lines of the more modern Ribbon UI?
Delphi offers a ribbon UI already – I just chose not to use it. I actually experimented with a ribbon-enabled FeedDemon a while back, but I didn’t like it at all. I think the ribbon is great for feature-heavy applications such as Microsoft Word that have dozens of toolbuttons, but it’s overkill for FeedDemon.
9. While the current support of Twitter is pretty basic will we see further integration of “social media” into FeedDemon and if so what kind of things are on the drawing board?
I don’t want to comment on specific features, but I will say that my goal with FeedDemon has always been to bring you the stuff that’s important to you, and the increasing noise of social media makes this more valuable than ever.
These days many services show you the stuff that’s popular among all their users, but to me it’s far more important to highlight the stuff that may be popular with you specifically. I’ll continue to surface the articles that are popular with everyone, but I’ll focus even more on finding ways to enable FeedDemon to bring you relevant articles rather than just popular ones.
10. In light of the growing popularity of social media what are your thoughts on the whole thing and how do you see old standbys like RSS – and FeedDemon – playing a role in it?
I see RSS itself fading more and more into the background as it becomes the plumbing behind many social media services, but at the same time, I see the potential for aggregators like FeedDemon to play a bigger role.
Those of us in the geekopshere have been using aggregators for several years and have found them to be a critical tool in bringing us information, but we tend to forget that the majority of web users still haven’t found their way to an RSS reader. As more and more people rely on social media applications, the need for a tool that can deal with the information overload becomes more important.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether FeedDemon can be that tool. At this point it’s still too geeky to be a mainstream application, and “de-geeking” it would make it seem less powerful to many existing customers.
11. Have you ever considered moving away from using the default IE rendering engine (Trident) and using WebKit? The reason I ask this is because of the possible benefits that it might allow both you as a developer and us the users. For example it would have support for HTML 5, CSS 3, and possibly thing like plug-ins and the such. My reasoning being that by doing so more ‘browsing’ would be available to the user thus reducing the need of using our browsers.
This is something that comes up a lot, especially with Firefox users who want FeedDemon to use the Mozilla rendering engine (which I’ve addressed in my blog a couple of times).
The short answer is that I wish there was a simple way to switch between rendering engines, but there isn’t. And even if switching was simple, no matter which one I chose, some customers would complain. The fact is, Microsoft has made it very easy to embed their browser, and they’ve done it in a way that enables re-using the version of IE that’s already installed on the customer’s system.
Of course, I have to add that you can already use FeedDemon as your browser – in fact, it’s what I do most of my browsing in these days, and I love having a browser that’s also a powerful RSS reader.
