I have been a fan of NewsGator for many years, and count company founder Greg Reinecker among my friends. In the last few years, however, they’ve moved in the direction of corporate information portals and cobrand their splendid RSS reader for large corporations, media outlets, etc. They’re doing great, but as an entrepreneur and (I admit it) information junkie, I migrated from NewsGator Online to Google Reader about a year ago and haven’t looked back.
Except for one problem: NewsGator has very sophisticated search capabilities that are neatly integrated into their RSS reader, and after years of successive refinement, my current search query is the unwieldy:

NewsGator: Keyword search for intuitive.com or askdavetaylor.com or blogsmart or findability.info or “dave taylor” -hockey -kings -wwe -wrestling -alberta -government -“Best MLM Company”

It’s long, ugly, complicated, but it works very well to help me keep track of mentions of my business anywhere in the blogosphere.
I could use Google Alerts for the task, and I do have some Google Alerts running, but it doesn’t search as big a pool of information as NewsGator does.
Nonetheless, using NewsGator Online in addition to Google Reader is tedious at best, so when I had a chance to sit down this afternoon with my friend Ari Newman, head of Filtrbox, and get a quick demo from him, I was struck at how incredibly easy they’re going to make it for all of us to have — and continually tweak and improve — highly sophisticated searches.
The most important part: Not only is Filtrbox stepping through more information sources, but I can easily create an RSS feed and — and here’s the kicker — subscribe to that feed in Google Reader.
Now, finally, a way to have everything integrated into a single place.
As I said when I started, sorry Greg, I’m leaving NewsGator Online after many years, and can finally centralize everything in Google Reader, thanks to the powerful filtering capabilities of Filtrbox.
Note: Filtrbox is not yet open to the public, but Ari assures me it’ll be ready for everyone in just a few weeks…