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feedly is a Firefox extension that brings integrates Google Reader in your browser. It works by simply syncing your feeds with Google Reader and any changes made in either of the two are reflected in the other. It boasts of a magazine type layout which does seem very friendly at a glance. It also provides the options of adding Twitter, Friendfeed and the likes to your RSS feeds.
feedly is also very highly customizable as it can serve as a screen saver as well. The aesthetic customizations go a long way, but then any serious RSS reader wouldn’t care too much about them. There are 3 types of views, Cover, River and Wall. The cover view provides you with a categorical view of the feeds based on their sources, where as the River view provides all the feed snippets in a line. On the right side, the recommendations or sources are shown. The top title bar shows a Google Search box. Here’s a list of some features by ReadWriteWeb
Feedly’s River of News
This new river view offers the following features:
- Longer lists of 200+ articles, loaded on demand as you scroll.
- Ability to set various type of filters: unread, category, subscription.
- Keyboard shortcuts - the same as Google Reader
- Ability to click on the summary of an article and expand it inline.
- Ability to play video and listen to podcasts directly from the list.
- Google Reader-like ability to automatically mark articles as read while scrolling
- Summize-like notifications when new articles are published.
Although the idea is very good, but I don’t see it moving anyone from Google Reader. It just doesn’t compare with it. Google Reader just does feeds and does them well. And even Safari’s RSS reader is better than feedly as I’ve found. It can also show different views and is one of the best browser feed readers I know. While feedly is more like a web service than a Firefox extension, I wonder why they didn’t just make it so. That way, they would attract IE, Safari and Opera users too. Those who just want a visual experience of their feeds, feedly will serve them well, for all others, Google Reader is the king.
Scoble actually predicted a Google Reader social bookmarking engine in 2006.
You can now add friends to your friends list, share feed items, bookmark single blog posts from blogs that you read on the web and here’s the kicker, there is now a blog recommendation engine that recommends blogs you do not read by what your friends list is subscribed to in their Google Readers.
Then, everything you share and bookmark in Google Reader of course comes up on your Google shared items page linked to by your Google profile.
What really blew me away was the recommendation engine. If you add as many of your email list subscribers as you can to your Google Reader you can get a real good idea of what other blogs your subscribers are reading.
The links in your shared items are all HTML and fully followed so every time one of your RSS subscribers shares a blog post it is creating incoming links to your site.
Better yet, it uses the exact blog post title you wrote so now your links use your keyword phrases and bookmarkers can’t change your title tag.
After talking to my SEO top dog contacts, they were all floored and assured me this is the new SEO tactic that no one knows about.
http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=136
It is kind of hard to add friends, the easiest way is to send a chat invite from Gmail and then email your contact you want to friend and have them email you back. It seems Google wants a two way conversation before they will allow you to become mutual friends.
If you would like to friend me, add chrislang at gmail.com to your Google Gmail chat and send me an email letting me know so I can return an email to you, thereby creating a two way connection in Google.
Google is quietly rolling this out behind the scenes but it is a full blown social bookmarking application and the blog recommendation engine is the new blog marketing strategy.
One thing I have not quite figured out is if using FeedBurner now hurts you since the links point at the FeedBurner redirect rather than your site like a WordPress feed does.