TECH NEWSS

FeedDemon 3, which is available for download here, includes some new features that turn this already-brilliant RSS reader into an almost perfect Twitter client for Windows. Here’s why:

1. Support for Short URLs

If any of the tweets includes a URL that has been shortened using TinyURL or any other URL shortening service, you can simply hover the mouse to know the real "long" URL. See animation.

2. Subscribe to your Twitter Timeline

FeedDemon is one of the few RSS readers in town that support authenticated feeds. That means you can subscribe to your Twitter Friend’s timeline in FeedDemon as long as you know your Twitter username and password.

Such a thing is not possible in Google Reader since it doesn’t "official" support RSS feeds that requires a password.

3. Twitter Avatars

When you subscribe to any Twitter search feed in FeedDemon, it always will show profile image of the person who made that tweet. This is again very helpful in scanning large results especially when you use the newspaper layout with two columns.

4. Search Twitter from FeedDemon

FeedDemon, by default, includes the Twitter search engine so you search tweets directly from the address bar of FeedDemon without having to fire your web browser.

5. Get Tweets via Desktop Alerts

In FeedDemon, you can select a group of feeds that will pop-up desktop alerts as soon as new items are published in that feed. Go to Tools -> Options -> Desktop Alerts and choose all your Twitter feeds. This will help you track Twitter even while FeedDemon stays minimized.

6. Intelligent Hyperlinks

When you subscribe to a Twitter feed inside Google Reader, all the tweets are plain text and just link to the original status message. FeedDemon, on the hand, will auto-discover Twitter usernames, web URLs and #hashtags in the tweet and converts them into hyperlinks. See screenshot.

7. Send Links to Twitter

This feature is not available in FeedDemon 3 by default but let me share a quick hack that will help you post links from FeedDemon to Twitter (similar to Tweet This button on blogs).

Open the "SendTo" folder present inside the default installation folder of FeedDemon 3:

C:\Program Files\FeedDemon\Data\SendTo

Create a new file "twitter.xml" in this folder and copy-paste the following text inside this file:

 template="http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading {title} {url}" />

Now restart FeedDemon and you’ll see a new "Twitter" option under the Send to menu as shown here.

8. Send replies from FeedDemon

If you are reading your Twitter timeline or a Twitter search feed inside FeedDemon, you can reply to any tweet directly from FeedDemon via the new "twitter reply" icon in the menu.