Feedly – Personal start page for Google Reader

Posted on June 27, 2008 at 5:13 am

Have you ever thought of setting a personal start page for your web browser? A start page is actually your own Internet browser’s homepage with a twist. For example, instead of a static page, sites such as iGoogle or Yourminis allows you to configure your own start page where you can add widgets, website links, your favorite RSS feeds and more.

Having said that, one of the advantages of having a comprehensive start page is that you can take a quick look of items that you would interest you the most without having to browse multiple web pages. If you constantly log in and out of Google Reader to check out your RSS news feeds, it might be the right time to consider Feedly as your own personal start page.

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Feedly allows you to automatically grab and show all your Google Reader news items neatly organized as a personal start page inside your Mozilla Firefox web browser. To start, you need to download and install Firefox’s Feedly add-on here.

Next, click on the Feedly’s round, orange RSS icon on Firefox’s toolbar. Feedly will then try to grab and arrange your feed items in tabs based on your Google Reader’s folders/tags. You can then browse and read your feed items as you did inside Google Reader’s interface.

Feedly Features

Feedly offers several advantages over Google Reader’s original user interface. Some of them are:

Feedly is social and magazine like – items are arranged in a mag-like interface that is much easier to the eyes. What you do and your friend’s recommendation will influence how Feedly delivers your content.
What’s New page – Feedly learns about your reading habits and friend’s shared items and delivers the most relevant content in real time.
Welcome Wizard lets you add your current personalizations from My Yahoo!, Bloglines, FriendFeed, etc. and apply it to Feedly’s start page.

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The Wall shows a quick overview of all articles based on friend’s recommended items and notes. You can also opt to have Twitter updates shown in this page.
Dashboard tab shows at-a-glance view to manage all your favorite news sources.
Annotation and Share tool – you can share articles quickly among your friends or just highlight / annotate the only interesting parts.

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Twitter friendly – you can quickly twit interesting items via Feedly’s integrated twitter client.

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Explore module adds consistent recommendations of interesting, latest news sources that you might be interested in.
Search tool makes searching all your personal news items for specific keywords a breeze.
Tight integration with Google Reader – what you did in Feedly will reflect / be in sync with your Google Reader items. For example, news items marked as read in Feedly will be marked as read in Google Reader too and vice versa.
Keyboard shortcuts support for those looking for a speedier navigation between news items.
Easily preview a news item in its original web page from within Feedly.
Screensaver – a fun way to look at your news item, albeit not really useful for reading purposes.

What I love about Feedly is that it offers a new way of looking at your Google Reader items in your own, Mozilla Firefox’s personal start page. The fact that Feedly shows items based on recommendation of friends and reading habits makes it a little more appealing than the original Google Reader’s interface.

With an API readily available for web developers, we can look forward for better, richer Feedly interface in the near future. Don’t miss to try this promising personal start page add-on today!

This is a guest post by Syahid A. from TechMalaya

Tags: feedly, personal home page, personal start page, start page, google reader