Reprinted from TidBITS#821/20-Mar-06 with permission.
Copyright (C) 2006, TidBITS. All rights reserved.
http://www.tidbits.com/

NetNewsWire Public Beta with NewsGator Synchronization
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  by Glenn Fleishman <glenn@tidbits.com>

  RSS feed aggregator and news reader NetNewsWire released its first
  (and then second) public beta of the next major version of the
  software, numbered 2.1. Version 2.1b16 was released during the
  day, followed quickly by 2.1b17 after a few bugs were quickly
  fixed and found.

<http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/beta.php>

  One of NetNewsWire's key differentiating features among other RSS
  feed wranglers is synchronization, which enables you to use a copy
  of the program on different computers and, with some effort, keep
  both the feeds you subscribe to and the news items you've already
  marked as read in some sort of coordination. Supporting sync files
  can be written to either .Mac (for subscribers) or to an FTP
  server.

  But this synchronization was never perfected. It wasn't based on
  atomic transactions, so deleting a feed via NetNewsWire on one
  machine wouldn't delete it from a corresponding machine. I also
  regularly saw items that I had marked as read at work appear as
  unread at home. These were minor carps, however, because I knew
  that developer Brent Simmons would ultimately solve these
  problems.

  Instead of building the Web-based infrastructure that would make
  NetNewsWire more flexible (providing a way to read news online)
  and more accurate in synchronization, Brent sold NetNewsWire to
  NewsGator, one of the leading Web-based feed reading firms, and
  joined the company. NewsGator had a robust infrastructure that
  can handle large numbers of users and reduces the overall strain
  on RSS infrastructure by polling or retrieving items as necessary
  for all subscribers only once, regardless of the number of
  subscriptions. (For those of us who live and die by readership,
  this does reduce our ability to know how many unique visitors
  we have reading our feeds, but it's a good trade-off.)

<http://www.newsgator.com/>

  Subscriptions to NewsGator are free for Web-only usage, with fees
  from $3.95 to $7.95 for handheld, phone, and Windows Outlook
  newsreading depending on options. These subscriptions include
  limited access to paid content, too.

  NetNewsWire 2.1 now uses the NewsGator infrastructure. First,
  sign up for a NewsGator account if you don't already have one.
  Next, choose Show Sync Options from the File menu. The Account
  tab offers NewsGator as an option in the Sync Using pop-up
  menu. It also lets you name locations; the default name is
  taken from your computer's Rendezvous (10.3) or Bonjour (10.4)
  name. (NetNewsWire works in 10.3.9 and later ostensibly, but
  a bug in the beta prevents Panther access at the moment.)

  The Starting Over tab of the Show Sync Options dialog box lets you
  seed your feeds if you're already using NetNewsWire. From my work
  computer, I chose to Replace Subscriptions on NewsGator Online.
  I have 228 feeds, and this operation took several minutes, but
  was completed accurately.

  Now for the best part. The mechanism by which NewsGator and
  NetNewsWire synchronize is no longer a slow, modal process
  that must be manually invoked or scheduled. Rather, at every
  refresh, your NewsGator account is updated via a series of
  tiny transactions. The same is true when you create groups,
  remove or add feeds, or mark items read.

  NewsGator also reduces the load on your Internet connection
  because NetNewsWire now first polls NewsGator to check whether
  a given feed has been updated since the last check. NewsGator's
  centralized feed observation can tell NetNewsWire whether or not
  to retrieve the feed using a few bytes instead of hundreds or even
  thousands. NetNewsWire is noticeably faster as a result and should
  be much more usable on slower connections, such as 56K dial-up
  connections.

  So far, the beta has worked flawlessly on my work and home
  computers, including refreshing my home computer's feed from
  NewsGator and rearranging items in folders in NetNewsWire.
  As I tried feeds into folders, I could see those changes a
  few seconds later when I refresh the NewsGatorOnline tab on
  the company's Web site.

  NetNewsWire 2.1 goes a long way towards making RSS feed management
  and news reading a seamless and organized task. Perhaps I don't
  need 228 feeds - I begin to have the overload factor that led me
  to RSS aggregation in the first place - but I can already more
  reliably see what I've read and remove feeds that are past their
  prime.