I’ll admit, I have an ambivalent relationship with RSS feeds. I mean, I only have so many hours in day that I can spend reading them. And just looking at the number of unread feeds in my reader can be intimidating enough to make me want to crawl back into bed in the morning.
Feedly is a nifty tool that just might change my relationship with RSS. It lets you organize your feeds into a stylish, magazine-like start page. So, instead of a list of feeds and unread articles staring you in the face, you get a nicely-formatted page showing the newest articles in each feed. Feedly pulls graphics from the web page and the first paragraph from each article, so you can decide at-a-glance if you really want to read it or not.
Feedly also makes it easy to share articles you like via Twitter, email and Friendfeed. There’s also a “karma’ page that tracks retweets of links you’ve shared. Firefox users will appreciate the ability (through an experimental Firefox Add-on) to subscribe to your favorite feeds with a click of the mouse.
The user interface is attractive, and the folks at Feedly were nice enough to provide a tutorial on how to set it up. However, ease of use could definitely be improved for some features. For example, it would be nice to be able to customize Feedly’s appearance by selecting from a color palette instead of entering in a code for the color you want. Also, I’m not sure what the “expose” setting is for…and there isn’t an explanation on the “preferences page” or a FAQ.
The concept behind Feedly is not especially innovative- Streamy and Netvibes offer similar services, and Streamy offers better social networking support, allowing you to share content on more social networking services, including Facebook.
That said, I still think Feedly is a useful tool that just might change my relationship with my Google Reader account. What do you think of it? What other services do you use to make it easier to keep up with your RSS feeds?
Our Rating of Feedly
Categories:web
Tool of the Day: Use Feedly to Spice Up Your RSS reader http://su.pr/2gVRO0
Tool of the Day: Use Feedly to Spice Up Your RSS reader http://su.pr/2gVRO0
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