E-Mail Updates
enter your e-mail address:
Firefox Facts

Pros and Cons of Feedly Add-on for Firefox

whatsnew.part1 Is Feedly worth your time?  As a new type of article for Firefox Facts, I thought I would weigh in on both the pros and the cons of this add-on and give you my final thoughts on if it is a keeper or not.  Mind you – I am a very picky man.

If you believe the front page of Feedly.com, even Leo Laporte tweets, “My new favorite Firefox extension (and home page): Feedly.”.  I have heard about Feedly for a while now (from several sources), so I figured it was time I gave it a shot.  You can pick up the add-on for Firefox via the official Feedly web site or the Firefox Add-ons web site as well. 

The Install of Feedly

The toolbar icon for it is automatically  placed in your navigation toolbar, so I give it a click and it already has me signed in and has found my Google Reader account.  That is pretty cool.  Under social connections, it is asking me if I want to import Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Twitter or Friend Feed.  I handed it Twitter, then watched it work.  Ok, think this thing is up and running!

The Pros of Feedly

  • I like the fact it works with Google Reader and Twitter (the only two I tried) right off the bat, with no problems at all.

The Cons of Feedly

  • The ad box on the right of the web page layout is HUGE! (conveniently not shown in front page screenshot above).  Here is the huge ad in question.  You can click it to get the actual ad dimensions:

    feedly-huge-ad

  • The toolbar icon is ugly and has rough edges
  • I had to resize my browser to larger than 1024×768 to see the page correctly (without a horizontal scroll bar).  Should be a more flexible layout.

Final Thoughts on Feedly

I have to say, after spending a little ‘bit of time with Feedly, I just don’t get it.  Why do I need a Firefox extension for this?  Couldn’t they do it all as just a web site that imports things I plug into it?  Now I understand all the social aspects, but it just does not tickle my fancy.

Agree or disagree?  Let me know what you like about Feedly and maybe you might win me over.

For more help, check these out...

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted on October 2, 2008 in Add-ons, Usability

 

Comments and Feedback

Leo said on October 2, 2008 (permalink)

Well, I disagree.

I just installed it yesterday and although it has some things that drive me nuts, I’m very picky too and can’t use something ugly.And boy, Google Reader is really ugly for me. I hate it. But I love it’s convenience.

So with Feedly I can have the good looks of the webpage and the features of Google Reader in the back end.

Yazan said on October 2, 2008 (permalink)

Agreed.

I installed feedly a while back, just as an alternative to google reader. I liked the j,k, star, and mark-unread functions and back then feedly didn’t do that well.

Has that changed?

Anyways, its a stunted feed reader that isn’t worth using unless you really want the social element.

Mitch said on October 2, 2008 (permalink)

I like Google Reader, then again I always have it in “wide screen” view (so I never see the sidebar) and it works perfectly for just scrolling through posts - speed reading - till something catches my eye.

Mandar Deodhar said on October 2, 2008 (permalink)

Google reader is good. but I like sage and bloglines as well. Feedly is not that great. Neither other firefox addons for the same purpose.

Edwin Khodabakchian said on October 2, 2008 (permalink)

Hi Mitch. Thanks for taking the time to right this review. Sorry it did not work our for you. Here are some quick answers to our questions:

1) “The toolbar icon is ugly and has rough edges” Yes. This is a problem we will try to address for beta 2.

2) “The ad box on the right of the web page layout is HUGE!” We understand that it is going to turn off some people. Our goal is to create enough value that people are ok having one ad (standard size) on the page. The homepage image is old and will be updated as part of the beta 2 launch.

3) Regarding having to resize the screen, there is a preference (more link at the top right > preferences which allows you to set the width). We do not do this dynamically because it slows down the rendering.

4) Add-on versus website: the add-on approach allows us to mash-up your existing services (Google Reader, Twitter, etc..) with better performance and more importantly without having to touch/manage user credentials. There are a couple more additions in beta 2 which will re-enforce this decision.

Yazan: feedly supports j, k, star. Click on ? to see the keyboard shortcuts. You are correct in that we do not currently support mark as unread.

One final note: our goal is not to compete directly with Google Reader: if you are a fast information scanner, Google Reader is the best tool in town. We are building feedly to try to bring the goodness of RSS and social filtering to people who are looking for a more fun/magazine-like reading experience. We are still early in the dev process so if you have suggestion on how to improve feedly, let us know:
@feedly on twitter
http://www.getsatisfaction.com/feedly

Edwin Khodabakchian said on October 3, 2008 (permalink)

Update: we have changed the image on http://www.feedly.com/ to reflect the UI changes we have done over the last 6 weeks and make sure that there are no deception at that level.

Mitch said on October 3, 2008 (permalink)

Thanks Edwin for the update, and be sure to let me know when/if a new version comes out and I would be happy to give it a second try. :)

What Do You Think?

Comments for this post will be closed on 30 January 2009.

Bonus: Check out my weekly web hosting podcast, the Web Hosting Show! - RSS Feed

Mitch Keeler © 2008 - Sitemap | Privacy Policy - Supported by Lockergnome and TagJag
Dedicated Server Hosting provided by FastServers.Net

Go to Top of Page