Feedly: A Great Way To Read Your RSS and Social Media Feeds

Feedly currently works as a Firefox extension only, but there is already and experimental Safari version and also rumours about a Google Chrome version.

After you install Feedly, you’ll see is a neat page that asks you if you want to synchronize with your Google Reader, Twitter, FriendFeed and other web 2.0 accounts. If you ask Feedly to connect with Google Reader or Bloglines, it will then load a copy of your OPML file that contains a list of RSS feeds you read from there. If you’ve got it integrated with Twitter, it lets you tweet about articles on your start page. Similarly, many other services can be integrated.

The Cover and Digest views are the most popular start pages, both offering different layouts of the following:

• Featured articles from your favorite feeds at the top
• Selected list of unread articles from all feeds
• Your latest Twitter stream, Twitter mentions, and Karma (more below)
• A view of your Friends, Twitter trending topics, etc.

When you read an article in Feedly, you can easily email it, and share it on several social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc:

A very interesting feature is that Feedly shows you the number of times that article has been Tweeted, shared on FriendFeed, number of Diggs, and comments on the original post:

Feedly Mini is a little pop-up that shows up at the bottom of your browser window when you’re browsing the web, even when you have not opened Feedly which you can use to Email, Tweet, Share and Star in Google Reader/Feedly any article on the web, even if you are not subscribed to that page’s feed. It is incredibly powerful compared to the Google Reader bookmarklet:

Overall, Feedly is a great alternative to Google Reader which also synchronizes all the feeds you read so you can always go back to using Google Reader without much of a fuss if you want but after a couple of hours with Feedly, I am almost sure you won't want to go back!