Brent, Nick, Greg and Jeff on their newly-free desktop feed readers

Many people prefer to read blogs in a feed reader or "RSS aggregator" rather than making the daily rounds in their Web browser. Today, two of the oldest and most popular desktop clients were released by Newsgator with a compelling new price: $0. Several key people at NewsGator have blogs; let's take a short tour.

Here's Brent Simmons, the developer of NetNewsWire:

Why go free? ... the software is great marketing for our enterprise software; and the more users we have, the better able we are to calculate relevance and importance.

I dream of being able to make it so you spend less time reading stuff you don't care about—I want the important news to go right to the top.
...
for me personally, this is a dream come true. Every developer wants to be able to work on the software they love, make a living at it, and give it to the world for free.

Usually you get to pick two out of three—if you're lucky. Me, I get all three.

Next is Nick Bradbury, the developer of FeedDemon:

1. It's the Enterprise, Stupid

2. Your Attention is Valuable

PS: Your Privacy is Valuable, Too

CTO and Founder Greg Reinacker:

What we're working to do is to saturate the market with our clients.
...
we've found that when we go into an enterprise to sell NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) and Social Sites, there are already a ton of people using one of our desktop apps already. The more folks are already using them, the easier it is to sell our server products....

More on "attention" from Jeff Nolan, VP of Corporate Development:

Better content means feed discovery based on preferences and behaviors, network search and relevance filtering, in effect achieving community-based collaboration and filtering on top of what the system can do off keywords and word association. You will be hearing more about this in the months ahead, we have a slew of partnerships and product updates in the works that will deliver best in class features to help you find feeds that are map to your interest areas, and individual content items that are relevant to the posts you are clipping and sharing.

Bits of history: NewsGator purchased NetNewsWire (and hired Brent) in October 2005 and purchased FeedDemon (and hired Nick) in May 2005.