Feedly-Why its way better than Google Reader

Google reader hasn’t been under much light these days, and I have to tell you, I just see the same screen day after day and it just feels so damn boring.  To cut down the boredom I tried the desktop client FeedDemon for quite some time before I got back to Feedly.  The last time when i tried Feedly 2 years back when i used Firefox with the extension. Feedly then was in its initial days with a very minimal features. Feedly was good but since i had just started using feed readers i was quite happy with Google Reader.  I’ve been using Feedly for some time now and this is what i think it’s good at.

For those who aren’t aware of what Feedly is. Briefly Feedly is a Feed reader addon (extension), which synchronizes with your Google reader to give you a better feed reading experience.

When compared with Google Reader, Feedly gives the feel of reading a Magazine, which is so much better than the Google Reader’s layout. When I mean Magazine, yeah it looks colorful with all those Images from your feeds with a gist of the post next to it. Besides that you get to view your posts in one of the many predefined page layouts like Latest or Popular or Quick glance to get a quick index of your feeds with unread counts.  Wanna look up something you read recently for a link, there’s the handy history section which allows you to see all the recent items you have read.

Social Integration is the best part of Feedly. Besides Twitter and Facebook they do have quite a good number of Social sites like Tumblr, Posterous,Ping.fm, Evernote and Instapaper integrated right into it. That’s more than enough social integration for me personally. and the sharing is pretty seamless with out any hassles.

The other interesting feature is that your twitter time line is shown in a column on the right to keep you abreast with your social conversations. The cool part of the twitter integration is that the karma section throws a quick stat of the number of clicks or retweet’s of the articles you shared. Tracking a response of your tweets seems so much fun; probably this is what they mean by measuring influence using social media. The layout is precise that twitter is not distractive, and gives you the right balance between your feeds and the twitter streamline.

Feedly in all has put user experience as their priority and have worked on the features in a focused manner.  Feedly does all that Google reader does and a lot more, only in a better way. The only down side of Feedly is that it requires you to have a Google Reader account. Feedly so far is the best feed reader that i would recommend for everyday use. Check Feedly for yourself. Here are the links for the addons for the respective browsers FireFox, Chrome and Safari. There are mobile versions of Feedly for Iphone, Ipad and Android, check their home page from your phone for a download.  BTW Feedly for Safari is still in its initial stages, Not that there are issues, just thought you should know.