« Fighting a War | Main | Cool Things »
October 04, 2005
Newsgator buys Ranchero (NetNewsWire)
Wow. I’d thought that the state of the Mac online press had deteriorated since the founding editor of MacMinute departed, but I hadn’t realized how much.
This morning, Scoble posted a rumor (via Om Malik) that NewsGator was buying Brent Simmons’ company Ranchero Software in order to buy NetNewWire. By lunchtime the rumor was confirmed - and while there are now official announcements and an interview on the NewsGator site (nothing on Ranchero or Inessential), there hasn’t been a peep from any of the major “frequent update” Mac news sites (*)
Why is this a big deal?
“NetNewsWire is the premier desktop RSS reader for Mac OS X. According to some statistics, it’s the most popular desktop RSS reader on any platform, even though it’s Mac-only. It’s also one of the earliest desktop RSS readers - the first public version was released July 2002.”
Not to mention, Brent has been a very active - and proactive - developer for Mac OS X, championing new technologies, best practices, community, and good, clean UI design.
If you’re a Mac user, and you’re regularly reading sites via RSS, you’re probably using NNW. Maybe it’s not your primary reader (a lot of folks like NewsFire), but it’s certainly in your toolbox. One could argue that NetNewsWire has been something of a seminal work in news aggregators - on any platform.
Congrats to Brent. And for the Mac news sites out there - why did I have to hear about this from Microsoft’s lead blogger/evangelist, hrm?
Edit: While I was writing this, John Gruber of Daring Fireball - who is quoted in the NewsGator press release - posted about this in his Linked List section.
(*) Why didn’t I link/list to all those news sites? If they aren’t serving the news, why should I up their googlejuice? MacMinute, MacFixIt, MacRumors, AppleInsider, MacInTouch, MacSlash… miss any?
Posted by jim at October 4, 2005 02:53 PM