introspectiveH

Last week, I was introduced to an application called feedly by one of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, Anshu Sharma. From the home page, it's described as "…a firefox extension which weaves twitter and Google Reader into a magazine like experience." In Anhsu's blog post, his focus is on the new service called feedly mini; however, I must admit, that I never tried feedly at all. After only week, I am hooked, and here's why:

1. Beauty – Feedly is very pleasing to the eyes. The flow, design, navigation, and page layout just work very well together. It enhances your reading experience and makes browsing feel less like homework and more like a hobby. This is one thing I have missed since subscribing to the many blogs I follow. If I am going to spend multiple hours a day keeping up, it helps when it's comfortable and fun.
2. Full Google Reader integration – I was highly impressed with the Google reader integration and how easy it was to setup. Actually, it was so easy that I didn't have to do anything at all. Once installed, it gathered all my Google reader information and built my page automatically. The picture above was what I got straight out of the box, no configuration necessary. It organizes all your content based on your current feeds and categories. Just in case you are worried that you won't be sold on feedly and you may want to go back to Google reader, do not fret. When you read, share, or save a post in feedly, it automatically does the same action in Google reader. It even synchronizes between the two when you subscribe or unsubscribe to a feed. It also works in reverse, so anything you do in Google reader, is reflected in feedly. Even as a bonus, when I went to email a post to a friend, it was able to do a live lookup from my gmail address book…sweet! Hey, hold on here, do I see a Google acquisition coming on?
3. Keyboard Shortcuts – If you are a shortcut geek like me, that is the first thing you will check when trying a new tool. Well, good news, feedly uses most of the same shortcuts as GReader. So if you are already used to and addicted to these, you will be very pleased. There are many extras available too that aren't available on GReader. The only one I miss that I haven't seen on feedly is the Shift-A shortcut for marking all items in a category as read. They have a button, but no shortcut (yet?).
4. Feedly mini – I have used feedly mini a little too, and it's also a neat add-on. When you visit a page, you can see if others are talking about it on twitter, digg, etc. You can also save, share, or email the current page from the mini feedly toolbar.
5. New Content Discovery – based on your current subscriptions and current friends, feedly builds recommendations to other content. I have already found and subscribed to a couple of blogs using this service. Maybe the crew at feedly should go talk to the guys at pressflip and really get some powerful content suggestion going on.
6. Other cool toys – twitter integration, friendfeed integration, and a neat semantic web feature that uses open calais, which has much potential to change the way we search and organize web content.

Feedly breaks the mold of a traditional RSS reader and makes for a very enjoyable reading experience. I never had complaints about Google reader, but after using feedly and seeing the difference that beautiful visual aesthetics can make, I won't be going back anytime soon. Feedly is a winner and my new RSS reader of choice. I just put in my pre-order for the Kindle 2, so I hope the guys over at feedly are working on a Kindle friendly version; that would just be the icing on the cake.

Disclaimer: Even though it may sound like it, I do not work for feedly as a product evangelist.

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