I discovered Feedly this morning and in just a couple of minutes it changed the way I interact online.
One of the things that drives me bananas about many social media apps these days is the lengthy process I need to go through just to get it to understand who I am and what I care about. Feedly eliminates this pain entirely. I simply went to the site, installed the Add-on to my Firefox 3 browser, and when the browser restarted, I saw a view of all of my blog feeds (grabbed from my Google Reader), neatly organized into tabs corresponding to the categories I set. It asked me to log in to Twitter and boom! My feeds were there, as were links to all of the people I follow on Twitter who also have a Feedly account.
The best thing about Feedly is that I immediately saw the value in the tool. Many tools claim to be the most useful thing in the universe, but after weeks of exploring I still don’t see their real usefulness. BrightKite and Sprigley are two examples that come to mind. Not that they are bad ideas – they are both actually pretty good ideas. But their their real value is not apparent up front. Nobody has time to dig around for the usefulness of a tool. Show me value right away.
With Feedly, I immediately saw all of my information on the screen. I saw how I can read through my posts and annotate, favourite, save for later, or even say “no thanks” to a post I don’t want to read. My favourite feature is being able to Tweet someone’s blog post FROM THE ACTUAL POST. I click the “Tweet” link and a box appears with the title of the post and the link (already conveniently in TinyURL format). I click send and it’s posted to my Twitter feed instantly. WOW.
This is the social media app I’ve been waiting for. Give me everything I need in one place, make it fast, make it pretty and let ME control what I see and how I interact with it.
Congratulations, Feedly. You totally get it.
woah! I just installed it and have no clue what happened. It opened a browser tab and showed all the rss feed items from my google reader. How the heck did it figure that one out?
As for Firefox 3, that was intense yesterday trying to get to it. haha!
Thank you for taking the time to write this review (and glad to hear that your experience has been a positive one so far). We are still early in the dev cycle. Don’t hesitate to email me or use http://www.getsatisfaction/feedly is you run into issues or have suggestions on how to improve the concept. Thank you!
Hi Don,
Google Reader has under their streamlined UI a very rich and flexible – undocumented – API. Feedly integrates with that API.
Edwin
I like it! Very cool.
I’m wondering how I can get the rrs feeds from my Thunderbird at home listed in my Firefox 3 at work. Is there a way to do that, Edwin?? I would love you forever if there was. 😀