Newsgator cages FeedDemon: RSS everywhere

Om Malik breaks the story that Newsgator has acquired FeedDemon in a “cash and stock” deal (I suspect these are modest numbers); FeedDemon developer/CEO Nick Bradbury will join Newsgator as their lead client architect.

Chris Pirillo has an insider interview with both teams; insider is not meant as a pejorative, it just seems clear from the questions (and timing) that this was amongst familiars… all good in my book. Regardless, definitely worth a read.

Dave Winer speculates that a Mac client acquisition, perhaps NetNewsWire, will follow. [Ed: Sure, I suppose, if the price were balanced with the available/addressable market.] He then extends his thoughts to a roll-up vision, stating:

“I imagine that Newsgator will roll up with Feedburner (they share an investor), and Technorati may become part of this deal too. The goal? Get large enough to go public or merge with something going public (SixApart) or get bought by Microsoft.”

Well, that’s an interesting series of comments. FeedBurner could certainly join the growing Newsgator empire, but that would be tying up with the wrong end of the micro-content stack. A more logical move would be backward integration with a publishing platform, or forward integration with a marketplace owner; of course Dave doesn’t care for ads in Feeds, so if you’re a fan of his, chalk his comment up to a clever, low-key dig. 😉 Regardless, unlike other components, FeedBurner is best served by achieving escape velocity as a standalone player providing a network service ala the collapsing Overture model of old.

I’d largely say the same of Technorati, though they clearly are a better fit for the ‘consumption’ end of the stack. It wouldn’t be at all surprising to see some of their offerings integrated with Newsgator properties (as perhaps the default, but changeable, provider of various services). Mainly, people need to stop thinking about Technorati as a “search” company and recognize that they’re an analytics shop. If you think about them in those terms, it becomes clearly that they could be providing a variety of services to a variety of players/segments. Rumor has had them repositioning into the enterprise space as well, but take that as the second-hand info it is.

The sleeper here, touched on lightly in Pirillo’s interview, is TopStyle, the client-side authoring environment. Many of us having been looking for such functionality to be integrated with an aggregator for (freaking) years. (At PointCast, we went so far as building our CDF authoring tool using the client shell, though that was a (horribly) rushed effort from the get-go, and our broad CDF support was killed long before we could have dreamed of integrating the two). The question here is if Newsgator decides to go full-stack and marry TopStyle to its own publishing API. Obviously, that would have all sorts of interesting implications.

As usual, my congratulations to all involved.