I was sifting through my Google Reader feeds and thinking how boring and uninspired the interface appeared. Lucky for me, I checked into SarahinTampa’s site where I learned about Feedly. Feedly is a Firefox plugin that is fully integrated with Google Reader and makes your favorite feed reader all pretty and magazine like.
After downloading and installing the add on, log into your Google account. The welcome wizard will prompt you to check the personalization you want to add, like bookmarks, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Netvibes, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Friendfeed and, then, will incorporate them into your Feedly.
The result is gorgeous. However, beyond the sexy magazine like view of your favorite feeds, there is a lot more substance, too. For instance, since Feedly is integrated with Twitter and FriendFeed, you can see what your friends are recommending. See the wall screenshot below:
Wall Screenshot
You can also annotate parts of an article you’re reading and share it via email, FriendFeed, Twitter, or recommend it to others. In the What’s New tab, you get a summary of content available on the web based on your interests, your reading patterns and recommendations from your friends.
Recognizing that uber (as in voracious) feed consumers want information chunked to digest as much as possible, Feedly created the River tab which displays information in a long list format to help appease their appetite:
Feedly River
- Longer lists of 200+ articles, loaded on demand as you scroll.
- Ability to set various type of filters: unread, category, subscription.
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Ability to click on the summary of an article and expand the full content (including ff, digg and comments) inline.
- Ability to play video and listen to podcasts directly from the list.
- Google Reader-like ability to automatically mark articles as read while scrolling.Another nice feature is Feedly’s integration with Google search.
You can do a search in Google and Feedly’s search results will appear at the top of the page if there are related RSS items 7 days old or less. The search results combine social filtering because feedly uses the recommendation and annotation behavior of your friends and friends of friends to pick the most relevant articles:
Feedly Search
This is my first day working with Feedly and figuring out the various features. I’m definitely impressed. So much so, I doubt I’ll be hanging out in my Google Reader anymore.
What about you? What’s your favorite aspect of Feedly? Any issues?
Posted by FA Editors at 8:23 PM PDT
