The Feedly and Friendfeed way of doing things

Byrichard

Venture capitalists love to invest in something that works, something that’s concrete. If it’s got a 900% user growth rate overall and tripled in size in the UK alone then this is excellent. That’s the perfect website to invest in. Of course I’m speaking here of twitter. The 140 character twitter website that no one has time to use yet everyone flocks to. With the recent twestival you see that it’s gone local, and that can only mean one thing, that it’s gone mainstream. Perfect, now the web celebs can come in without looking too geeky. Cue Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry to name just two individuals.

It’s passed though. The golden age of twitter is behind us. 140 characters and social presence have moved on from there and I think the companies we should be focusing next are feedly. friendfeed and google reader. The reason for this is simple. We all love to create content and we all love to talk about it. We all love to show others that we’ve found something but the drawback is that we create a lot of duplicates. These duplicates aren’t bad if you’re only following five or six friends. When you follow twenty eight thousand though it does start to get tedious however.

That’s where I feel real enthusiasm for feedly. As you go from blog to blog you find a lot of content that’s interesting but aside from what’s written in the comments for each post you have no idea of what others have thought or said about this. Feedly gives you a small box at the bottom right corner that tells you the number of conversations that have taken place and a quick method by which to see which are the most active references to this post. As a result you don’t need to wait for the kettle to boil to start a conversation. It’s already there.

That boiled kettle of course is Friendfeed. That’s where people will be moving next. That’s where we will find the conversation moving next. Watch the realtime thread and you can see who liked the post, who was vocal about it and when the most recent comment comes in. What this implies is that the limitations felt by twitter will become a thing of the past. We’ve got a high end solution for our content needs.

Of course we’re individuals. We all like to have our own rss feeds and personal content and that’s where google reader integration comes in. At the start and end of the day, when all those we are following are taking care of their children or walking their dogs we can go hunting for original content. We share that content and once people wake up they can comment and so the cycle continues.

Other websites are now providing more interesting options and deserve at least part of that pie.

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Feedly

Byrichard

Recently I started using feedly which is a great tool for managing rss feeds and content into an easy to view form. Connecting with google reader, friendfeed and a number of other surfaces it provides you with three principle displays for viewing the content you have selected to have aggregated.

The first display shows your content by theme. In my case these themes are social media, video, technology, explore, and of course my own content output, to some degree. From this display I can quickly see a number of topics.

The second display is named digest. It displays three of the top unread stories with the title and a quick description of the articles in each category. You can cycle through these articles using the ever popular J and K keys, j for going back, K for going forwards. A counter tells you how many items are left for each category.

The list view gives you a quick headline for every blog post. It’s a quick way to go through your rss feeds. The articles expand to their full length once they have been selected.

Above is what I think is the most interesting feature of all. It’s a demonstration of how feedly is integrated into your every day browsing. Anytime you go to a blog you’re made aware of the conversation that is taking place and how active it is. You may also share that content to a number of platforms, from google reader to friendfeed, twitter and more to add. You can add a note to explain why you think that blog post is relevant to your readers.

Of course the reason I love this application, requiring firefox, so much is that it allows for the entire world wide web to be something your share with those who are interested in where your attention is being drawn. It syncs with google reader, integrates with friendeed and just provides a great all round user experience. I strongly recommend using it.