My love of feedly

If you are a Firefox user but aren’t using feedly yet, it’s time to take a good look on how it can help you improve your ability to keep on top of the plethora of blogs that you would love to read but feel like you don’t have time to do so.

feedly is a magazine-like layer that works with your Google Reader feeds and provides valuable context and dashboard information on how to get the best out of the news that’s important to you.

There are three main views, the Digest, the Cover and the list of latest posts, as well as the ability to drill down into specifically defined categories.

feedly also adds in Twitter and Amazon to provide you with information on what others are saying or books that can help bolster the information you are reading.

What I love most is the layout. You can easily see photos and videos, clearly see the links and share news with your friends on a variety of social media sites. Best of all though, you can expand each link to see more without having to go to the Web site itself.

You can highlight your favorite blogs so you see them first when you visit feedly and you can easily subscribe to any RSS feed with a tiny Feedly icon  in the address bar.  There’s also a Karma feature that works a bit like bit.ly and other link services in that it allows you to see how many people click through your links on Twitter.

Essentially feedly makes a lot of the extraneous sites you may have used to manage your feeds and information completely unnecessary. You can do most everything you need right from feedly.

It’s changed how I read my RSS feeds and has enabled me to better manage the content that I care about.  I get the top posts right up front and can easily drill down to receive additional information. When I visit other Web sites I get a small flag in the bottom right corner that gives me the ability to share the post in feedly and Google Reader, to favorite it, share it on Twitter or it may recommend other related links.

Suddenly the way that I view my RSS feeds is interactive, contains context and helps me to be more organized, productive and to become better educated (or amused! I do have a celebrity category!).

With so much information available at our fingertips, it will be tools like feedly that will truly transform the way people use the Net. Creating interaction and context through aggregation, using an easy-to-use dashboard/home page provides immense value. Tweetdeck and Seesmic also come to mind when it comes to these sorts of tools.

So now I wonder, why hasn’t Google bought feedly yet? What it does for Google Reader is truly game changing.

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Tagged as: community, context, facebook, feedly, google, Google Reader, information, interaction, Mozilla Firefox, news, relationships, RSS, Seesmic, sharing, social media, TweetDeck, twitter