Free RSS Readers, the Future of the Twittersphere and the River of News

Since NewsGator made the announcement in January that its consumer products would henceforth become free, followed by news that another paid reader, NewsFire, would follow suit, there has been no lack of people in the blogosphere trying to see beneath the surface of the moves. NewsGator explained its reasons pretty clearly when we made the switch, but it doesn’t stop people from speculating.

The Graphic Man, for instance, suggests that the readers went free because of the presence (or fear) of Google Reader. I’m more partial to Austin Heller, who argues that Google didn’t have much to do with our decision, which is what we said in the first place.

Meanwhile, Steve Gillmor over at eWeek opines about how Twitter seems poised to become a part in the new world of Enterprise RSS. And RSS pioneer Dave Winer posted another argument for why newspapers should be offering their online readers his River of News concept, which seems to make perfect sense to this longtime news reader.