Tag Archives: Feedly

Feedly Introduces Boards, Notes, Highlights

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RSS aggregation service Feedly has been working hard to expand its service offerings to make it more of a valuable tool to businesses and power users. Feedly recently entered the next phase of its development with the release of its new Boards, Notes, and Highlights features:

Whatever your motivation, the power of information lies in your ability to harness it. Today we are sharing three new features we hope will make your Feedly experience even better: Boards, notes, and highlights.

As you save more stories, your Boards become libraries of the most important stories you find on Feedly. Everyone can create new Personal Boards. Feedly Teams users will see separate lists in the left navigation for Personal and Team Boards.

Feedly goes on to describe this new feature as:

  • Boards: For saving and organizing stories. All Feedly plans (Basic, Pro, and Teams) can save stories. When it comes to naming your Boards, try to keep a singular focus. This will keep you organized by your specific projects, clients, brands you monitor, or other important tasks.
  • Notes/Highlights: Feedly Pro and Teams users can enrich stories using notes and highlights. If you are part of a Feedly Teams plan, your teammates will be able to read your notes and add their own. Highlight the most important passages to make it easy for your colleagues and other executives to scan through stories. Since stories saved to Boards never expire, you’ll be able to revisit these notes and highlights in the future.

Some of these new tools from Feedly are available to users of Feedly’s free-service plan. More features become available with Feedly’s different paid-service plans. For more information, click the link at the top of this article.

Feedly Introduces Shared Collections

Information

feedly logoFeedly has announced the launch of a new service called Shared Collections. This new feature allows users to create special pages that contain everything they’d like to share from the feeds they’re following. A Shared Collections page is more than just a simple listing of RSS items. It can also be used by a team for collective sharing and collaboration. The look of these pages can also be customized to fit a specific theme or brand.

Shared Collections is an opt-in feature available as part of Feedly Pro. Feedly suggests that Shared Collections could be used in these ways:

  • Help your organization all follow the same publications, blogs, YouTube feeds, and Google Alerts
  • Lead your industry by curating and sharing a rich list of must-follow reads
  • Make it easy to promote your company or agency’s thought leadership by putting all of your employees’ blogs and social media in one easy-to-follow branded page
  • Organize your social media curation efforts by getting your team organized with the same sources

If you’d like to learn more about using Shared Collections, Feedly has posted a tutorial on using the service as well as a search page for finding existing collections.

Shared Collections is available thru Feedly Pro for $5.41/month for individuals and $12.08/month for teams.

Get faster subscriptions with Add to Feedly for Chrome

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feedly logoWith the death of Google Reader earlier this year, many net denizens were left scrambling for an alternative — and issuing a few choice words to Google upon departure. While countless (exaggeration) alternatives exised, most would up landing on Feedly. In fact, the service did an admirable job scrambling to add bandwidth and servers to face the influx head-on.

While the app does a decent job, there are certainly still complaints to be made about its shortcomings — lack of alphabetical order that results in a chaotic looking feed is mine.

Though that one has not been fixed by Feedly, extension or user script, other tweaks can be made. For instance, how about the ability to add a feed right from the site you are on and without even knowing the RSS address? That is what “Add to Feedly” can do, providing you are using the Chrome web browser.

The extension places an icon in your menu bar that, when clicked from any site, will automatically determine the RSS feed associated with a website and offer you an option to add it to your Feedly subscriptions.

This is one option that helps to soften the Google Reader blow just a bit, by adding a feature that we did not previously have access to in that old RSS program.

IF This Then That Comes to the iPhone

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IFTTT Today If this then that (IFTTT) came to the iPhone. If you are not familiar with IFTTT, it is an automator tool for the Internet. For example I use Feedly and Pocket and I use an IFTTT recipes that sends any article I save on Feedly to Pocket. There are hundreds of recipes that users have created on IFTTT from the very simple to the very complex. If you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again on the Internet that can be described as If A happens then Do B then you need to take a look at IFTTT.

Previously IFTTT was only available through the desktop. Today it was released to as an application to iOs, specifically for the iPhone, although it will work fine on the iPad. The app has added Contacts, Photos and Reminders function to IFTTT adding more recipe possibilities. I have already set one up that sends any photo I put in a specific iPhoto album automatically to Flickr.

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The bad news per Gizmodo is the app has to be active on the iPhone for the recipe to work. Unfortunately Apple doesn’t allow apps to run persistently in the background. This means that if you want to use a recipe you will have to open the IFTTT app first and then proceed. This kind of removes the automatic part of the equation. This problem will not exist on Android which does allow apps to run in the background. Despite this I do think it is worth downloading and giving the IFTTT app a try.

Feedly taking full advantage of Google’s stupidity

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feedly logoWhile all of us will lose thanks to Google’s inexplicable decision last week to shut down a service which seems to have been much more popular than the search giant would have you believe, one company is certainly not unhappy about the move. Feedly has been in a whirlwind since that announcement.

Within hours of the Google announcement Feedly had already posted detailed instructions on how disenfranchised users could export their RSS feeds from Reader and import them into the Feedly service.

Now the company has announced that it has received an influx of more than 500,000 new users in the first 48 hours after the Google announcement. “More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined the feedly community over the last 48 hours. We love passionate readers. Welcome on board”.

Feedly says it has added ten times its previous bandwidth to handle the load and that new servers are being brought online to help with the new found popularity. The company also plans on adding new features weekly.

Its nice to see a company that still understands the need that many of us have for a good RSS reader and wants to support the users of it, as opposed to simply ignoring its customers as Google has shown it is willing to do. Feedly is available for iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Using Friendfeed for Reading Feeds

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The feed reader you use is a very personal decision, I prefer Feedly which is a Firefox add on. I like its interface and how it works. However it does have one weakness and that is it can only be used on Firefox and Flock. This meant I needed to find a new solution for my Iphone. My solution is Friendfeed. This is how I did it.

The first thing I did was divide my feeds into categories, tech, social media, food etc.. I took those categories and created a Yahoo Pipe for each of them. I published all of them so you can find them at Yahoo Pipes.   I then created a group for each of them in Friendfeed.

These are the steps on how I created the groups. First go to your Friendfeed account. If you don’t have one, then sign up at Friendfeed.com, even if you don’t use it for this purpose you will find Friendfeed worth joining. Once you are on your account, go to the right hand side column and under groups go down to the bottom and click on Browse/Edit Groups. On the next screen click on Create a Group.  Name your group, which will also create the URL for the group automatically. At this point you can choose whether you want your group to be public or private. Then click on create feed, this will bring you to a page with a title of your group and nothing else. On that page click on edit setting. A small screen will pop up and you can add a description to your feed. Then click on Import feed, which will bring to a page to add services, go down to Custom RSS/Atom and click on it, in the blank you want to insert the URL for your Yahoo Pipe for that category. You can then decide if you want to import the feeds with a entry description as comment, or just the feed. You can also import them as texts only with no links. Once you finish your page will look something like this, you then can add a picture if you want or  share the Group with other people.  You can now read your feeds on any platform, where you can access Friendfeed.   For images of the step you can go to my Friendfeed Folder I created on Screencast.com

by Qumana