When Firefox 3.0 was officially launched last Tuesday, I updated my copy of Firefox and installed a few select browser add-ons. This included my normal batch of add-ons like Firebug, YSlow, Delicious Bookmarks, and a recently discovered Quartz inline PDF plugin (nifty!). Then I found out about Feedly. Feedly is described as "a more social and magazine-like start page."
Feedly taps into RSS aggregators like Bloglines and Google Reader and socially-oriented sites like Friendfeed and Twitter. The end result is a tight grasp on information overload. Loads of information from feeds you subscribe to and other services you interact with are all funneled into one nicely designed start page.
Twitter integration lets users tweet about articles, "the wall" highlights articles recommended from contacts and users can even annotate articles for their friends to see. One small feature I find particularly noteworthy is preview, which lets you load an article's webpage within Feedly. As a publisher, I like it when people dip out of their RSS readers and visit my site "in person" for a change. I'm sure there are still several Feedly features I have yet to discover.
How do I like it? For most of the 14 years that I have had Internet access, my homepage has been some Google-owned property, whether it was their homepage or their IG portal. I say "for most of" because there was a time when Google did not exist and even I used AOL, but I digress. Feedly is now my homepage. I was never big on living in Google Reader. Feedly has made it easier to absorb the content I care about.
My only piece of feedback for Feedly is that I would like the search box at the top to have the ability to search the web, not just subscribed content. I posted this idea to Feedly's Get Satisfaction page and it seems like it will be present in Feedly in the near future.
Thoughts?
What do you think of Feedly? Do you use it yourself? Feedly only shows its worth when you subscribe to a bunch of feeds, so here's my Google Reader OPML if you'd like a head start.
This is the kind of stuff I love writing about. Technology that changes the way I do something. Thanks Feedly.