An original user of Google Reader, some months ago when NewsGator decided to make its products free I decided to switch over and give them a try.  I’ve been using Feed Demon for a while now and have been more or less happy with it.

The scary part about switching to a new feed reader for me is establishing a level of trust in it.  The Most Important Thing that a feed reader has to do is to get me all the content.  It can’t miss posts.  It can’t drop ‘em.  If it got posted on a feed I’m subscribed to, it better show up.   And a couple of weeks ago I started getting suspicious of Feed Demon.   I’m subscribed to Andy Osenga’s blog feed and his comment feed, and comments started coming through for posts I hadn’t yet read.  The blog feed looked OK in Feed Demon, it just wasn’t updating.  Strange.  I unsubscribed and re-subscribed to the feed and then it all seemed to work OK again.

Fast-forward to today.  I was reading through comments from Geof Morris’ blog and realized…  I’ve never read that blog post.  I went over to ijsm.org and found out that I’ve missed at least 10 days worth of posts from Geof. Not good. Not good at all.

Feed Demon has a version 2.6.1 Beta available, and I might just give it a try… but for now I think I’m going to return to my trusty friend Google Reader. I exported OPML from Feed Demon, imported it back into Reader, and everything worked very nicely. It imported my 400-feed OPML file without a hiccup and managed to recognize duplicate subscriptions and not double-subscribe me. Time to give it another go.

In theory I still really like the idea of Feed Demon, what with it allowing local applications on multiple PCs to sync to the same online account, and allow web-based access, too. I’m also happy to have a non-Google alternative. (While I’m not a Google hater, keeping all the eggs from the same basket always seems like a good idea.) But if I can’t trust my feed-reader, well, sorry, it failed Most Important Thing #1.