johng Blog

Overnight it would seem that the popular web based news aggregator NewsGator has added new features to it’s service that make it frustrating and unwieldy to use.

Many people such as myself consume a large proportion of our daily news through the service. There is a lot of junk out there whether it be redundant news items or just simply things that don’t interest me. NewsGator used to display the entire contents of a feed, allowing hundreds of articles and posts to be quickly scanned through and stopped at if they peaked my interest.

To hamper this, in a clear effort to save bandwidth, they have restricted the length of all items to 3 lines and added a icon next to each entry which allows it to be expanded to show the full content. Right now I have 412 unread items in NewsGator and I do not plan on clicking on that little icon 412 times.

The great thing about NewsGator was it treated feeds like a river and not the email style system so many of their competitors were using. This is a massive step back and judging by a quick Technorati search I am not the only one annoyed by this.

For a temporary solution to this I recommend logging into the UK version of NewsGator which is held back a few versions from the main site. But when the update hits there you can guarantee I will be switching to something else. Any recommendations?