I was just asked by June Macdonald to contribute brief comments for an article she’s writing about “online services we love”. This was my response…

Is it possible to fall in love with a piece of software? Yes it is. FeedDemon entered my life several months ago and has radically changed the way I think about the web, how I communicate, and my very conception of what it means to be connected.

FeedDemon looks a lot like Microsoft Outlook or other desktop e-mail applications, but rather than checking every ten minutes for new messages on one mail server, FeedDemon goes out every hour and checks literally hundreds of web sites, news sources, and blogs that I told it to monitor. If it finds an update, it sucks down the information and has it waiting for me when I check FeedDemon. I now keep track of over 275 websites in almost real-time. There is no other way to be so wired.

And best of all, the underlying technology (XML feeds in RSS or Atom formats) is essentially spam free and one hundred percent permission-based.

William Gibson famously stated that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Well, if you want to live in the future now, download FeedDemon. In two weeks e-mail and the web will feel very old fashioned indeed.

(And no, creator Nick Bradbury didn’t pay me to say any of this.)