In my continuous quest for The Perfect RSS Aggregator, I’ve tried a number of
options, including Thunderbird, NewsGator, Google Reader and RSS Bandit. I’ve lately been testing FeedGhost, and have been very pleased thus
far.
Upon installation, a three-step installer gets you started very easily with
the reading style, importing OPML and choosing a theme. When the app
starts, you’re trated to a gorgeous interface. Even on Windows XP, the
application carries a Vista look. Screenshots are available from their
website at http://www.feedghost.com/Promo/Screenshots.aspx.
Instead of a menu, FeedGhost uses a ribbon-like interface. I am partial to
the Outlook-style interface, but the application can also be used in the Google
Reader “river of news” style.
After installing at work, FeedGhost imported the OPML from RSS Bandit
flawlessly, and started checking for posts. FeedGator is fairly
fast–considerably faster than Thunderbird, but not quite as fast as RSS Bandit
(still the fastest RSS aggregator I’ve found).
FeedGhost supports tagging of posts, and the creating of “link blogs”
(similar to del.icio.us) which can be shared. During the trial period,
synchronization is available and automatic. I installed FeedGhost at home,
and after the wizard, it instantly synchronized my feeds from their server, as
well as the posts I had not deleted, and began checking for updates.
Overall, it was seamless, painless and quick to have everything I left from work
appear at home. And that’s a lot of what I’m looking for in an
aggregator.
Once the trial period has ended, there’s a $20 annual fee for continued use
of some of the features (such as synchronization and support for more than 20
feeds).
Three improvements I’d like to see are:
1) Speed. Reed Ghost is fast, but RSS Bandit is so much faster.
2) Mobile reader (mentioned as an upcoming feature)
3) The ability to take posts off-line, for reading on a plane for instance,
and to sync up again when reconnected. Double bonus if I can sync the
off-line feeds to my Treo 700w.
Overall, I’m extremely pleased, almost enough to switch from RSS Bandit and
pay the annual subscription for the sync capabilities.
(Sorry about the above – delete if you like – pasted the wrong thing in!)
Thanks for the positive review Richard!
We’ve had a couple of comments about the speed – are there any particular areas of the application you find slow, or is it more an overall feeling?
With regards the trial period etc, we now offer a "lite" version of FeedGhost, available for free, with the limitation that you can only subscribe to twenty feeds.
Finally, just for information, the next major feature for FeedGhost, based on user requests, is a web-version.
Regards,
Stu
Hi Stu, thanks for stopping by!
Much of the slowness I initially noticed has diminished–that was probably due to the initial download of all my feeds. Even still, the main place I notice slowness is when refreshing the feeds. I’m guessing maybe because the app connects to your servers, which then fetches the feeds, and then the app updates? Whereas RSS Bandit is directly downloading the posts?