The Problem With NewsGator Syncing

I love the fact that I can read my feeds in NetNewsWire and on my iPhone seamlessly, but there’s one really annoying aspect that’s almost driving me to turn off syncing for a large number of feeds: NewsGator is days or weeks out of date for many feeds.

When syncing is enabled in NetNewsWire it no longer downloads feeds directly, but instead gets them from NewsGator which is how all the syncing magic works. This leads to much faster sync times but also means that you can’t actually refresh your feeds to find what’s new. All the refresh button does now is check NewsGator and there’s no way to check directly with the site itself.

A little while back I read, and now can’t find, an article about how NewsGator decides when to sync new feeds based on how often they change and how popular they are. This is a terrible algorithm to apply – any personalized feed winds up very out of date. Good luck to you if you happen to have something that’s important but infrequent coming through a personalized feed – I’ve seen it take a week or more to pick up new items.

It’s a real shame because the syncing is fantastic. Here’s hoping someone like Google buys them out and teaches them a thing or two about crawling the web at a reasonable speed.