Posts Tagged ‘Feedly’

My Feelings about Feedly

In my last post, I shared the news of Google Reader’s retirement on July 1 and suggested Flipboard as a possible replacement.  Feedly is next up at bat and it certainly doesn’t strike out. Feelings about Feedly Here are a few things I like about Feedly:
  • It was easy to sync with my Google Reader account.  I just entered my Google password and allowed Feedly access to it.
  • In addition to the mobile apps, Feedly has a Chrome extension for reading from a desktop or laptop.  The Chrome extension has a great interface for organizing feeds and has several viewing options.
  • It looks and feels similar to Google Reader, so there is not much of a learning curve.
  • The mobile app has day and night themes.
  • The mobile app opens web pages within Feedly and there is a tool to “remove clutter” that cleans up much of the web page content except for the blog post text.
A couple of drawbacks of Feedly are:
  • The Android “back” button often closes the app, whereas it would return to the list of feeds in Google Reader.  It’s just something I’ll have to get used to.
  • The shortened URLs start with feedly.com, making them slightly longer than bit.ly and Flipboard’s flip.it.
I am a big fan of Feedly’s Chrome extension.  On mobile devices, I prefer Flipboard’s navigation, but Feedly’s app has some great features and settings as well. Tim Gavin commented on my last post that he uses Flipboard for reading news and Feedly for reading blogs.  I agree with his assessment that Flipboard feels like reading a newspaper while Feedly is a more natural fit for reading blogs.  Tim’s suggestion is a home run.  Instead of choosing one or the other, I’ve decided to use a combination of the two products. Maybe I won’t miss Google Reader as much as I thought I would.