Friendly Feedly
During the last day, I’ve been playing with a Firefox extension called “Feedly.” The home page for the extension is at feedly.com. As the extension describes itself:
Feedly is a new kind of RSS start page which weaves Google Reader, Digg and Delicious into a more fun, magazine-like user experience. The integration with Twitter, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Friendfeed and Delicious makes sharing a breeze. You can get up to speed quickly by importing your existing Netvibes, Bloglines or MyYahoo accounts, your bookmarks or an OPML file.
What it does is act as a new way of viewing your feed content for those of us who read a lot of blogs (I scan at least 200, though some of those only update once a week). It uses Google Reader as its backend for accessing your feeds. For me, this is very convenient because I was already using Google Reader. This means that it reads my existing reader subscriptions, including folder organization, and presents views on it. When I mark items as read, save them for later, or share them, this is reflected on the Google Reader site. This makes it perfect for me and very easy for others to try if they are already playing with Google Reader.
Feedly offers various roll up views of top readers for blogs or other Google Reader information. It also allows you to use the “River of News” model for reading if you want to do so. One thing that I appreciated is that you can tweak a couple of different settings on how it presents feed contents to you. In the view below, I am using a short summary view with a small picture on a roll up page for one of my folders (personal-blogs). This gives me the first few sentences of each item and a picture. If I click on any item, it will expand in place to show me the full feed item. I can click on it again to collapse it or to choose options to save it, etc.
The only problem that I’ve run into so far is that it occasionally loses its synchronization with Google Reader so I see some of the same feeds or it offers me feed items that show as read in Reader if I go to it directly. This has only happened a few times but it is something that the software needs to work on. As a whole, I’ve found it to be a much friendlier way to use Google Reader and I plan to keep using it.
I’m not sure what the business model of the feedly.com site is for this but I expect that the search box at the top of each page may play a role. I haven’t noticed any ads or similar on pages yet. They do have a blog available and seem to be doing regular updates for the overall software.
This is for Firefox 3, only, of course. :-)
September 5th, 2008 at 1:01 am
Hi Al,
Thanks for the review. Regarding the out of sync issue, it is due to the fact that feedly, for performance reason, keeps a local transient cache of the feed entries and the read status and only update that cache when you log in and out or restart the browser so if you start the browser, go to google reader and then go to feedly, feedly might have cached in the meantime some of the information and seem out of sync.
I will ask the engineering team to look into this problem. Between now and then, the simplest work around I can think of would be to log in and out of feedly/google reader when you transition from Google Reader to feedly.
If you run into any other problems, we are listening at http://www.getsatisfaction.com/feedly
Edwin
September 5th, 2008 at 3:59 am
I've installed Feedly after hearing Deb like it. My main concern with Feedly is that it inserts suggested links in my Google searches. Try it and you'll see that after you do a search at google, Feedly pops in some links at the very top of the page. This is very interesting BUT should be a user option selected at startup, not something that I should be surprised by. I was so surprised by this action when I first saw it that I almost uninstalled Feedly at that moment. Once I realized what it's trying to do, I could see the value in it, but it's very disquieting for the user for Feedly to step in between the user and search results.
Make it a user-selectable pref at startup, not a default pref. My use of Feedly will hinge on this.
September 5th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Gen,
Thanks for the feedback. I will raise the issue at our team meeting this evening. Please note that there is a disable link in the search result and that if you disable it, feedly will never overlay any result on the search page anymore. It does not address the issue of permission and surprise but at least it reduces the annoyance to a one time event. Question: where would you put the permission/opt-in UI?
-Edwin
December 4th, 2008 at 1:26 am
Feedly looks at itself as a start page and magazine hybrid. The main cover page, noted by an icon that looks like a book, shows the latest new items from subscribed feeds, using your own learned reading activity, combined with your sharing history in Google Reader, to bring what's anticipated to be your most interesting stories to the very front. Feedly also, in the bottom right corner of the page, has an “Explore” option, where new stories from similar feeds you may not subscribe to, are available.
December 4th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Has read with the pleasure, very interesting post, write still, good luck to you!