Like a lot of people I know, I’m usually buried under an avalanche of work, stuff I want to read and absorb and incoming messages that fight for my continuous partial attention. My pal, Stowe Boyd, and I have both recently become aware of Feedly, a new Firefox extension that radically messes with Google Reader (which for me usually has hundreds, if not thousands of unread items in it).
Through some magical juice, Feedly grabs the stuff in your subscriptions, as well as a bunch of other attention stream data, and re-presents it in a much more interesting and consumable way.
Feedly offers a number of views into your attention stream data; What’s New presents what it says, The Wall is almost like FriendFeed and at the item level view (although all the features need to be at every level) are a bunch of cool features including the ability to bookmark/recommend an item, to email it, save it for later reading and send it to Twitter. That’s powerful stuff!
It’s making a vast difference to my ability to consume this stuff, and has replaced everything else as my default home page. I don’t quite think I’ve fully wrapped my mind around Feedly yet, but I am enjoying using it much more than flicking between Google Personalised Home Page and an overcrowded Google Reader.
6 Comments
Thank you for the review. We are still early in the dev cycle and look forward to suggestion you might have to polish and improve the product.
I’ve only just started using it so I haven’t had enough time to work out whether it’s a stayer for me, but from what I’ve seen so far, it’s looking pretty positive.
@trib - feedly looks bloody useful … it’s the first thing to
- get me off Bloglines
- get me using Google Reader
@khodabakchian - some more obvious hints and tips for getting the most out of it would be helpful - like how do I populate “People”?
I’m also getting a lot of value from Feedly. Makes scanning and digesting all the info in my feeds much more palatable and easy on the eye. As well as the visual aspect, it’s the integration with Greader which is the best part for me right now. I have a general preference for storing things with Google and Feedly complements that approach.
For those here who haven’t tried Feedly or are interested in a quick overview, Bwana McCall has done an introductory video over at http://www.bwana.tv/2008/06/19/feedly/
I’ve been looking for something to replace all those other things and this looks like it could be a good chance, thanks.
Nice screenshot, Stephen, shame about the ugly mug in the picture.
I looked at feedly this morning as seen you mention it on Twitter a fair bit. Having moved recently from Shrook to NetNewsWire (I love the synchronised feature and offline capability), I’m not sure about moving to another one, although it does look like it has some new features.