Even though many people don't know what RSS is about, there are still millions of users. After all, if you get newsfeeds from places like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) or Facebook, then you are an RSS user.

Well, one of the big players in the space -- NewsGator -- has raised $12 million in venture capital. The investors include Vista Ventures, Mobius, Venture Capital, and Masthead Venture Partners. In all, NewsGator has raised a cool $30 million.

The company has a consumer product, which can make your life easier (especially if you are a news junkie). For example, the NewsGator back-end platform processes about seven million new articles per day.

What's more, there are several enterprise products, which sync nicely with ubiquitous Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) applications. In fact, there are more than 100 Fortune 2000 customers.

Greg Reinacker, who is the founder and CTO of NewsGator, did a write up on the deal for his blog. And, if you want to check out other venture capital deals, visit DealProfiles.com.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

Microsoft has a habit recently of deploying very good software solutions with little to no fanfare, or connected to other pieces of software in an attempt to be the escapable "one stop shop" solution for many computing needs. One such beast is the newer "Microsoft Max" (what is with the name?), an integrated RSS feedreader being distributed with the Microsoft Max photo viewing and sharing software. Actually, the name "Max" pertains to the photo software, and the RSS reader functionality just comes along for the ride.

Arrington over at TechCrunch gives a pretty decent review of Microsoft's RSS reader in a blog post, and the question to me immediately came to mind -- why didn't Microsoft release the RSS reader function within the Microsoft Max software package as a standalone product? From what Arrington describes, Microsoft's stab at an RSS reader is excellent. It's well-done, easy to use and organizes news information into a very neat package for reading.

With very decent desktop RSS newsreaders like NewsGator and FeedDemon already in use by millions, Microsoft's new RSS "widget" (if that's fair) would seem to be introducing a very good level of competition soon when Windows Vista is released. That's just a hypothesis, but I'm sure that Microsoft will release this RSS functionality right on the desktop with Windows Vista when it is made public.

If you've beta-tested the latest Vista Release Candidate 1, is there a decent RSS program built-in? Internet Explorer 7 already has a decent RSS reader built-in, but this one inside the "Microsoft Max" photo software looks slicker than any I've seen. As the world moves over time to having web stories and news come to them in an RSS format instead of "going out" to multiple websites for information, Microsoft's move here will be a good one.