ReadWriteWeb

Google Reader may be one of the best things to happen to RSS/Atom feeds, but Feedly is definitely one of the best things to happen to Google Reader, and Feedly 8 makes it even better. With this release, Feedly adds tagging, "infinite" scrolling, and two new views.

The biggie, at least from my viewpoint, is the tagging. Feedly has always supported saving articles for later, but you just end up with a huge pile of items. Finding that really interesting piece on running a startup from last July can be tricky with no way to organize items except chronologically.

Feedly just launched version 6.0 of its free RSS reader for desktop Web browsers, Android and iOS. The app can now act as a client for your Tumblr account. You can read and reblog posts from within the colorful reader. It also sports some new curated topics, called "essentials," ranging from "Apple" and "Data Visualization" to "Do It Yourself" and "Gardening." Visually, the minimal app has teamed up with Vladstudio to provide some cute and colorful themes.

Feedly has also gotten more social. Previous versions had buggy sharing features, but those have been fixed, and today's release also adds Google Plus integration. Finally, the new features all sync across platforms, between the plug-ins for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and the mobile apps for phones and tablets.

In the world of personalized news readers on a tablet, the competition is hot between market leader Flipboard, upstart Zite, Feedly and Pulse . Flipboard hardly ever adds new features anymore (they are too busy cutting deals with publishers and reading all their glowing reviews in the iTunes app store) but last night competitor Pulse added a simple little feature that Flipboard and any other mobile or tablet reader ought to add as well: a bookmarklet users can click to save an article from the Web to read later in Pulse.

Conventional wisdom says that asking users to download a browser plug-in or drag and drop a bookmarklet will cause a huge drop in adoption - that drooling is the only operation most web users are able to perform and should define the outer limit of tools offered to them. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore, though. Our desktops and our mobile devices ought to be able to act as seamless if different interfaces for a world of personalized information, streaming above all these particular devices, up in the cloud.

You've probably seen the popular iPad app Flipboard; there are a number of competitors on iOS, most notably Zite. That crowded market looks different on an Android tablet though, so what's an Android tablet owner to do? I've tested the four personalized magazine-style news apps that most closely resemble Flipboard and here are my impressions. These apps are great to kick back with on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee or on a plane ride. (If you can avoid the many conversations people on the plane will want to have with you about your Android tablet.)

One of the mostly unrealized applications of Web technology is to allow small businesses to kick the tires of products they want to purchase, by putting up live product demos. Given the proliferation of Web interfaces on many products, you would think this would be a no-brainer; and while lots of companies have put up canned video screencaptures showing one or two products, no one has taken the time and effort to let customers test drive their complete product line to the extent that Sonicwall has with its Live Demo site.

The newest release of the Feedly reader version may be one of the essential reading applications you can have for any of your devices. It is the power reader's reader and available today on any Android or iOS device you can find.

Feedly has been around for a while. As a browser extension to Chrome and Firefox, Feedly has been taking RSS feeds and Google Reader and turning them into a smart magazine start page since 2008. It made things simple and elegant and easy to navigate. The new mobile version of the mobile application attempts to bring that same functionality to your devices.

RSS feeds were a big driver of innovation in the Web 2.0 era. RSS Readers like Bloglines, Newsgator and Google Reader became the go-to services for people to subscribe to the latest news and blog posts. Over the past couple of years, mobile phones have become a major content consumption device. Yet RSS Readers have struggled to make the transition. In part this has been due to the increased importance of Twitter and Facebook for circulating news and information. But it's also because tracking RSS feeds on your smartphone is a user interface challenge - and few, if any, startups have solved it.

This is the third post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. The first post explored the thriving world of music on smartphones and yesterday we looked at news apps on the iPad. Today we analyze RSS on smartphones.

Feed reading on the go is an unsolved problem, none of the available options really feels like they've nailed it yet. Feedly, the popular browser plug-in that turns your Google Reader subscriptions into an attractive magazine-style display, has just released an iPhone app that may be my favorite mobile feed reader I've tried. (iTunes link) When I've got free time and am looking for something good to read, I've been launching Feedly for the past few months that I've been testing it.

The app, which sells for $2.99, offers an attractive folder-based navigation that's easy to thumb through horizontally. Sharing, bookmarking, Tweeting and emailing are all very easy to do. There's no limit to the number of feeds you can subscribe to in the app. It uses a popularity metric to surface key items in each folder of subscriptions that you should read if in a time crunch. It's a great little app and well worth a few dollars.

Feedly, the magazine style feed reader we first covered back in August of last year, is now available for the Google Chrome web browser. As with the Firefox implementation of the service, the Chrome version also uses a browser plugin to offer an alternative user interface to Google Reader. This early version of the Feedly for Chrome release offers most of the features found in the original Firefox version of the service, but requires the installation of a dev build of Chrome in order to work.

The social news utility Feedly announced on its blog that it just added the ability to perform a supplemental search on content it knows about on any of a number of different sites like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon and more. Results from this parallel search appear in Feedly Mini, an unobtrusive pop-up notification area in the lower-right corner of the Firefox browser window. Search results are drawn from FriendFeed, Google Reader feeds and other sources.