Feedly – Upgrading RSS

I’m a huge follower of the RSS movement. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I had to visit all 100+ websites that I follow, to gather news daily. RSS Solves this problem for me. Although, it seemed to create a whole new one. Now instead of being able to follow sites daily, I found that if I was busy for a few days, the number of unread feeds built up quickly to in excess of a thousand and then it became all to easy to just hit the “Mark All as Read” button and start fresh. And sure it works, but by doing that I often miss out on days of news, which to someone like me, is a tragedy. But I always figured it was just something I would live with.

Then a friend mentioned Feedly to me a few days ago. It was my first real exposure to the River-of-News style of updates that many people tout as superior. Sure I’ve read the posts and understood the concept, but I never saw any need to switch to that style. Ignorance is bliss they say.

In the 5 minutes it took to get everything installed and configured how I liked it I realized that Feedly actually looks quite good. As a designer and developer, something like that is important to me (although you wouldn’t know it if you looked at this blog ). I find if something is visually appealing, I’m more likely to keep using it. But what I liked even better was that Feedly worked.

One of the best things about Feedly is that you can get an at-a-glance view of your entire feed repository and it’s tight integration with everything. A “Dashboard” link allows you to easily see everything you subscribe to, mark things as Favourites (or things you can’t miss!) and lets you drag/drop to re-order them. As a bonus, if you’re signed into your google reader account, it even syncs things up there for you. If you ever stumble across as website that you want to follow, simply click the  +F button in the feedly bar and it will be added to your feedly + google reader accounts.

As a personal testimony- I was 2 days behind on my feeds (Weekends tend to do that to me) and Feedly completely caught me up. Sure it has a “Mark as Read” option, but I never felt the need to do use it. Does Digg have 200+ posts? Change the view to Title Only and scan through 10 posts in the time it would take you to do one. Feedly not only sped up the rate at which I can consume news but it also offers its own integration into things like Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg and many others. So when I find a post I like, I can retweet it, or toss it on Friendfeed. You can also see if other people have already posted it and if they have you can join in the conversation about something.

I’ve never been happier with a feed reader. I’m sure problems with Feedly will arise sooner or later, but, single-handed, it brought me back to Firefox in full force.

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