Well, I made the switch to use RSS Bandit, and I have to say that Dare has done an awesome job. My main reason for switching? It supports Atom. It wasn't that I wasn't happy with IntraVnews, it was just that RSS Bandit supports Atom.


Why was that important to me? Mainly because of Google Groups beta (and a to lesser extent, blogspot), and Dare's comments about how he wants to support NNTP. I don't follow newsgroups very closely, but that's mainly because I don't want to have to open a separate program for news groups. Don't ask me why. I've tried to follow them, but after a few days, it just slips my mind.


Of course, until I switched to IntraVnews, I forgot to open RSS Bandit (which was my very first aggregator) after about a week. But I open my email every day. Having IntraVnews run automatically, I got in the habit of reading blogs, and now I can't imagine not reading them. I get more tech info from blogs than any other source. I'm not at Scoble's level, but I'm subscribed to quite a few feeds (126 right now - but how many blogs is that? I subscribe to the main asp.net feed, which is over 1000 individual blogs, as well as a few other site's main feeds). It's something around 300-400 entries a day. Maybe that's why I never get around to blogging on my own blog!


Anyway, I'm back from my tangent. Now that I'm hooked on aggregation, remembering to open RSS Bandit is easy. Does it bother me that my all of my feeds aren't stored in one place? Not really. It was nice to be able to search both emails and feeds that I've saved, but I can live without that.


I don't comment on posts a lot, but that may change with RSS Bandit - it's so easy. I haven't commented yet, but does it track what posts I've commented on? If not, that would be very cool!


There are a few things that could make it more useful to me. First, the ability to post to my blog. I know, that's not a simple thing, and there are a lot of tools that do this for you, but I want one tool that I can read posts and create posts in. That's how email works right? This isn't a gripe about RSS Bandit - not a lot of them do this.


The second feature I would love to see is posting to newsgroups. And I know Dare has mentioned he is thinking about how to do that. That would be cool. I would be much more likely to post to newsgroups if I could do it in a tool I already use.


Notice how I refer to Dare as "Dare"? Odd isn't it? I don't know Mr. Obasanjo (I'm assuming that's his last name) - never met in real life, never commented on his blog, never sent him an email, no contact whatsoever - other than reading his blog and using his software. But I feel like I know him. Amazing how blogs can do that.


One more tangent while I'm already off on one. Did you catch why I was switching to RSS Bandit? Google supports Atom. So one major player has put their name on a standard. What if Microsoft puts their stake into RSS? Does that mean there will always be two standards?