I can read my newsgator feeds – literally, my lifeline to the world – with the same level of sophistication at my girlfriend’s apartment on a Macintosh PC, on my friend’s wi-fi laptop in the florida keys, at my parent’s house, at my office, and at my apartment.

only one of these places lets me comfortably do anything in outlook (at home).

the reason i am motivated to post is that i think newsgator is still ignoring the potential of this tool. API could be awesome, but I think you should try to get the off-the-shelf version right.

i would pay for a highly functional web-only tool. looking at the fee/service menu, everything i get for paying is not valuable to me – outlook, media, etc. i would pay $5 a month for the barebones if i had to, and particularly if it worked better.

i’ve already tried to switch to bloglines twice because of issues with single-company headlines for yahoo RSS, but bloglines seems much worse – i don’t like the look and feel or functionality – but there aren’t any other options. as a businessman, the web-only version seems like a wide-open opportunity, because it still has a way to go.

1 – the navigation of settings, adding feeds, managing feeds and associated tabs is not logical; this is frustrating. all the setting and modification tools are not logically located.

2 – manually adding a new feed – which is all i ever do – takes a few clicks, and once i add it, i now have to select “show feed in newsgator online” as a “custom” adjustment, which is ridiculous since that is all i ever do. i should be able to add a custom feed and have it show up in the folder of my choice on the same screen, and that takes one click to get to.

3 – can’t view more or less than 50 posts per feed at once. don’t see where that gets set.

4 – i’ve been trying to get yahoo single-company headline rss feeds to work with newsgator, but they have been continually posing old items. bloglines, for all its other problems, didn’t seem susceptible to this. don’t know why.

5 – occasionally, blogs will republish 100 posts (blogger or typepad); seems like the bugs of RSS are still being worked out. at a bare minimum, maybe there just needs to be a way to “lock down” posts such that nothing prior to a certain date will show up.

i think there’s more, but that’s what i can think of now. – greg