Feedly - Your News, RSS, Google Reader

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on December 06, 2010

Feedly is a Google Chrome extension that displays the latest updates from feeds, blogs, and sites like Facebook and Twitter in a magazine-like view. It integrates with Google Reader, Delicious, Amazon.com, YouTube, and other sites. It offers numerous ways to add, filter, display, mark, and share content. It takes a little time to set up Feedly to do exactly what you want it to do, but the end result is like your own personal magazine digest of everything you're interested in, or might be interested in, since Feedly also does a good job of suggesting content.

You must be signed in to your Google account to use Feedly's features, such as Gmail access and Google Apps. We clicked Feedly's extensions panel icon and selected Preferences on the start page. We selected some options, including our settings for Google Reader, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and other sources. Next we clicked + add to open Feedly's source selector. Feedly offered a set of likely sources based on our browser history and bookmarks. We added some via a simple wizard. Next we tried searching for content, with some interesting finds. The Explore side panel offered keyword searches of suggested topics of interest; these were fun to browse through. Once we'd subscribed to our feeds, we clicked Organize Sources. Drag-and-drop capability and a pencil icon that accessed various properties dialogs made organizing our feeds a snap. When we opened our digest page, it displayed all the latest news, postings, and updates from our tracked sources in a layout that looked a lot like a glossy magazine's contents page, with pictures, captions, and lists, but better; it's totally interactive and with the ability to recommend, share, and save content. Clicking in stories opened a brief summary with various links and options; the Preview command opened the target page in a pop-up view, while clicking Visit Site took us to the actual page.

Feedly does something cool and different. It takes some time to get the hang of it, but there's a user community, forums, and tutorials to help you set it up just right. Few programs have done so well at pulling your stuff together and presenting it an attractive, readable, and personalized view.