The holy grail of the information junkie is the perfect Google Reader client. The idea is that you use Google Reader as your hub for subscriptions and category management, but you use an entirely different website to actually consume that content. (Some clients also take advantage of the Reader API to let you subscribe and organize in their interface).
Google Reader used to be pretty good on its own, but it’s a bit spartan — especially after its recent visual… er… refresh. Most clients took the Google Reader organizational model and just prettified it. With the advent of iPad apps like Flipboard, however, the trend has been to try to merge the utilitarian advantages of the Google Reader organizational model with the magazine-style prettiness and delight of Flipboard.
I have tried many different Google Reader clients over the years, but I’ve recently settled on one that really shines: Feedly. In a clean-but-not-too-clean interface, Feedly strikes the right balance between a beautiful experience and serious information consumption tool. ”My Feedly” is your front page that pulls the most interesting or popular articles to your attention right when you log in. Once you’ve read or scanned those, you can click the check mark on the right side of the screen to mark that page as read, and then either refresh or move to a new section. The sections correspond to your Google Reader subscription categories.
Feedly also provides a series of widgets across the site that are actually useful. For example, on the home page are a list of “Featured Sources” from your subscriptions (which you can customize) if you want to jump to a specific feed. An “Essentials” widget provides a list of curated sections that you can subscribe to, like Gardening, Android, and Cinema. Feedly also hooks into your Twitter and Facebook feeds to scoop out most-liked or -tweeted articles. In fact, there is a very basic interface to post Tweets directly from Feedly if you want. Stock quotes are also pulled in.
Although the default view for any given section is the magazine layout (see first screenshot), there are five other views to choose from: timeline, titles only, mosaic, cards, and full articles. Feedly retains Google Reader’s ability to mark as read only those articles older than a day or a week. And there is a really excellent subscription management system that lets you easily subscribe, categorize, and drag-drop feeds between categories.
When you click an article to read it, it opens in-line. You can use j/k to navigate between articles. The usual social feedback and sharing tools are there — Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc. — and you can also shoot an article over to your Instapaper if that’s your thing. Other great features include a quick “Preview” tool to pop up a view of the original webpage, a built-in bookmarking system to save articles for later consumption, and a new tagging system that let’s you organize posts into custom collections.
The only thing that could make Feedly better is a mobile app, and sure enough there are versions for Android and iOS, built on top of HTML. I’ve found these to be really great, with really intuitive swipe gestures to mark views or sections as read or unread.
Whether you’re a casual feed reader, an info junkie, or have never even heard of RSS, I recommend you give Feedly a try.
