Giving Feedly a chance

Sep 17, 2008 Author: Veronica | Filed under: apps, internet

I wrote about Feedly a few months ago, when they were going through a bit of a PR kerfuffle with users over deleting Google Reader items without notification (when you edit a feed in Feedly, Google Reader also changes). They’ve since fixed that issue, and I was encouraged (by Garnett) to give the service another shot.

I’m not good with keeping up with my feeds. In Google Reader, I hit the “(1000+)” mark in all my categories a long time ago (this, of course, fluctuates depending on the amount of free time I have on any given day). The pure fear and annoyance of going through everything is a major road block for me, as is the defeat of hitting “Mark all as Read.” Upon bringing my feeds into Feedly, I immediately enjoyed the magazine view:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

It’s a great way to get an instant snapshot of all the newest updates. Clicking on a feed item opens it up in the Feedly page, much like reading an item in Google Reader. You can recommend the article (which I believe shares it in gReader as well) or send it to one of your social networking sites. Happily, you can also use keyboard shortcuts to jump between items and initiate other actions.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

But hey, this service has been out for a while, and there are many good reviews on it, but I wanted to give them a fair shake now that they’ve address the major problem I had with them. I’ll probably still use Google Reader for when I need to power through my gaming and tech feeds, but Feedly makes discovering content in my feeds that I may have missed a breeze. For now, I’ve made Feedly my new start page in FF3, replacing iGoogle. We’ll see if it can remain an integral part of my daily online experience!

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13 Responses for "Giving Feedly a chance"

Edwin Khodabakchian September 17th, 2008 at 11:55 am 1

Hi Veronica.

Thanks for the post. We are huge fan of your work so it is good to see that we won back some of the points we lost earlier in the process.

We are still early in the dev process. if you run into any issues and need technical support, just shout @feedly on twitter and we will try to help. If you have suggestion on how to improve the product, we are also listening on http://www.getsatisfaction.com/feedly. Beta 2 is around the corner so the timing for feature request is good.

Edwin
John Bell September 17th, 2008 at 11:56 am 2

I would probably LOVE this… if I used FF, which I don’t. I’m a big fan of Safari, and use the RSS feature in it to stay on top of my feeds, but I do love the layout of Feedly. Maybe I could use FF as my Feedly “app” so to speak…
Todd September 17th, 2008 at 12:06 pm 3

OK, I will try Feedly, based solely on a Veronica Recommendation.

I see they support “Linux” so we are off to a good start, but FYI I use YubNub as my homepage so the bar is set pretty high!
Edwin Khodabakchian September 17th, 2008 at 12:25 pm 4

Todd: the homepage bar is probably too high for us at this stage (it is going to take at least a couple more iterations before we deliver on that) but you might still get value from being able to click on the feedly button and get a quick summary of the best content being published on the feeds you are subscribing too.
Charlie Anzman September 17th, 2008 at 6:12 pm 5

Veronica – I remember the ‘call-out’ on Twitter all too well and my comment to a client back then ‘one popular person on Twitter can trash a project for months’ I’m sure that wasn’t your intention. Just ‘frustration’. Really glad to see this piece and Edwin’s response…. AND, you embracing Friendfeed!! (I also returned to using Feedly most of the time. It makes Google Reader A LOT easier to read and share).
Shawn Farner September 17th, 2008 at 6:20 pm 6

I’ll have to remember to give Feedly a shot as well. I routinely end up in 500+ territory when I neglect Reader for a weekend. Maybe Feedly can help me sift through my feeds a lot better.
Otaku Daddy September 17th, 2008 at 9:55 pm 7

Am I “old school” for still just visiting all my bookmarks every day? I suppose it IS a little time-consuming. Perhaps I should set up something like feedly and start subscribing. I’ll just bookmark it for later.
Sunfrog September 17th, 2008 at 11:38 pm 8

Yay for you liking Feedly! I like it too.
eric f. September 18th, 2008 at 6:15 am 9

Hmm. I was about to try it until I found it didn’t work in my Safari. I got the impression it was web-based…
Phil Glockner September 18th, 2008 at 2:16 pm 10

Congrats on getting the FriendFeed Comments plugin working! Looks good! If you want to massage its CSS a bit more, there are some stylesheets in the plugin directory you can mess with.
Chad/Lloyd September 18th, 2008 at 8:21 pm 11

Thanks for the tip; I absolutely LOVE the site. Of course I did end up wasting like 1.5 hours playing with it this morning instead of writing my article. It’s services like these that remind me how far we’ve come with the convergence of certain types of technology.
Ben Burris September 21st, 2008 at 10:23 am 12

I’ll give it a dhot now they fixed the Google Reader thing.

“Good enough for V. It’s good enough for me!”
pritthish September 27th, 2008 at 10:53 am 13

@veronica, seems from the skitch screeny that you are into hackintoshes

[dont get me wrong, im typing this from mine atm lol, just didn't know u were even remotely interested in the osx86 project ]