FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 comes with several interesting new features and also one drawback which will be addressed later on. The short setup wizard will be started even if an older FeedDemon version is installed on the computer system. This might confuse users as it could seem that all feeds that have been added to that version have been lost during the upgrade. This is however not the case. The old feeds will be integrated into the new version. This takes some time as the feed items are imported and the databases checked.

The first thing that springs to mind is the new interface that looks friendly to the eye. The RSS feeds are still listed in the left sidebar and the contents in the main right window. A new addition is a small advertising window at the bottom left of the screen. That’s the drawback that I mentioned earlier on in the article. The advertisement is not really that obtrusive but could irritate or annoy some of the users.

A lot of new features have been added to this version of FeedDemon including tagging support for items which can be synchronized with Newsgator and displayed in various ways including a tag cloud at the Subscriptions Homepage. Multiple new features have been added for Twitter users like subscribing to Twitter feeds with avatar images, Twitter timelines, balloon popups for short urls that display the redirected page, replying to Twitter posts directly, automatic hyperlinking of information in Twitter feeds, the ability to send links to Twitter and even a Twitter search engine.

That’s a lot of additions for Twitter users but that’s only a tiny fraction of all the new features of FeedDemon. Users can now import Google Reader subscriptions directly but still no Google Reader synchronization. This feature is planned and it might be released in upcoming versions of FeedDemon 3.

Performance has been improved quite a bit especially when searching subscriptions or browsing popular topics. There are two interesting – and new – export options available. The first will export feeds in newspaper format into an external html document. Excellent for sending someone else a compilation of interesting feeds in that format. The second is to export the top feeds only.

Interested users can take a look at the full changelog of FeedDemon 3 Beta 1 here. This is also the location from where the RSS reader can be downloaded to the local computer system.

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A user of Feedrinse may add up to 500 feeds to the service and group those feeds in different channels. He can do so by adding them manually in a web form or importing a opml file that contains a list of feeds. The filters can then be configured for feeds individually or for every channel.

The filter options can be used to allow or disallow feed items that do or do not contain specified posts, titles, bodies, tags or authors with a certain string. It could for instance be set to only include feed items that have been written by a specific author or that have been tagged with a certain keyword.

A new RSS feed link will be created that contains only those items that have passed the filter. Users who need more options to filter and customize feeds should take a look at Yahoo Pipes instead.

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