I find myself relying on traditional feed readers less and less these days (stream readers like TweetDeck and Seesmic have replaced them as an hourly habit). But when I do look at my feeds, I like to look at them through Feedly, which presents the stories in a visually appealing, magazine-like layout. Feedly is a Firefox plug-in that lets you import all of your blog and news feeds from Google Reader (or from your bookmarks, Netvibes, or Bloglines).
Today it will be releasing Feedly Explore, the latest version of its reader. The main new feature is an explore page which helps people discover new blogs to read by highlighting celebrity reading lists, staff picks, and sources based on popular tags.
You can also put in your own search term, and Feedly will deliver the most recent results from both your sources and other blogs, as well as YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, and Crunchbase. It also searches your Twitter and FriendFeed streams.
For any topic you search for, it also provides a list of “featured sources” which are the most authoritative blogs on the subject. And if you do a search from the new Explore page, you get a preview of the feed for each of the top sources, ranked by number of subscribers. It also tells you how many articles a week come out on that particular feed and how many recommendations it has. Any feed can be subscribed to with one click from within Feedly, of course.
The new discovery features are an added bonus, but the big draw for me remains the visual layout and Feedly’s ability to assemble it on the fly. It just makes the news easier to scan. Netvibes is doing similar things with turning feeds into something you actually want to read. The next step I’d like to see is some sort of alert, a glowing red button maybe, indicating different levels of hotness based on the attention any given story is getting both within these readers and elsewhere.
Feedly is fast becoming the best online feed reader.
Not only its design is minimalist with well structured sections, but the various options for sharing and tracking feeds and its integration with Google reader makes it a winner!
With the Firefox extension, feedly works great!
I just hope they release something on the same lines for Google Chrome!
Will make a lot of feedly uses very happy, especially me.
I hope they will offer some customization options as it would make it easier to have different colours for feeds.
I used Google Reader before, and Feedly only enhances it. Love the visual layout. Tried to use Twitter exlusively as my designated RSS feeder, but that didn’t work out so well. The speed of information flows much faster on Twitter.
Feedly is the dogs nuts, plain and simple. It’s everything Google Reader SHOULD have been. Really really digging feedly.
newspaper style for twitter search: http://bit.ly/94yz9
Feedly is definitely best choice to read your RSS feeds and i’ve been using it for a while, maybe over 6 months. Visual is awesome and the sharing options available covers pretty much the most popular services nowadays, the only complain i have is it doesn’t seem to be lightweight, and slows down my firefox browser a little bit.
The problem is, as apparently people are moving from RSS Readers to Twitter maybe feedly came up too late.
Congratulations to Edwin and team for this great review. Feedly Rocks!
“Visually appealing”, but at the expense of efficiency.
An algorithm which sticks articles in “beautiful” columns arbitrarily is a confusing, and in the end just a distraction.
That company should be called “Crappy Logo”.
feedly is absolutely the best way to read feeds. read techcrunch through it every day. once you try it, you’ll never use google reader again
feedly rocks I don’t understand why it doesn’t get more coverage in the tech press