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.