I’ve seen a number of posts lately in which the market share of RSS readers is determined by the number of hits the author sees from each RSS reader in his or her server logs, and while FeedDemon is always ranked near the top, I can’t help but point out how flawed this method is. For starters, FeedDemon defaults to updating feeds – that is, checking for new items – every three hours, whereas many RSS readers default to updating every single hour. And unlike a number of RSS readers, FeedDemon honors the feed’s <ttl>, so that the feed’s author can specify how often it’s updated. A large number of feeds (including some of my own) specify a <ttl> of 1440 minutes, so that the feed is updated once a day rather than once an hour.
Perhaps more importantly, FeedDemon only automatically updates feeds in the current channel group. This approach has caused some controversy with a handful of customers, but I stand by this design. Before creating FeedDemon I studied existing RSS readers, and it struck me how bandwidth-unfriendly many of them were. In my opinion, having a huge treeview of feeds that are constantly updating is wasteful – not only does it unnecessarily consume bandwidth, but it also slows down the application. It makes far more sense to me to regularly update only the feeds you regularly read.
In other words, a well-behaved RSS reader like FeedDemon is designed not to hit your server very frequently – so basing RSS reader market share on your server logs is wildly inaccurate.