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.

With F8, Feedly now has a rudimentary tagging system so you can group articles. I say rudimentary because at the moment, it only seems to support a single tag per item. When I'm tagging items in Evernote or other systems, I often use two or more tags. (Like "tickler" for article ideas and a relevant topic like "javascript" or "hadoop.") But at least now I can separate items into some sort of order, so that if I want to dig out a piece on Vim from six months ago it should be easier than scrolling through six months of saved items.

The other thing missing here is that you apparently can't assign tags using Feedly's excellent keyboard shortcuts. If you're used to plowing through articles using the keyboard shortcuts, you'll still have to slow down and get clicky to add a tag.

Tags are private now, but expect more goodies based around tagging with Feedly 9. According to the F8 announcement post, with Feedly 9 you'll be able to "selectively publish and share your collections." Sounds just a little like the old days of goodness with Delicious, before that service was sucked up and derailed after years of neglect by Yahoo. (Not that I'm bitter or anything.)

Views

Feedly has always had a number of different "views" you could use to browse your feeds. With Feedly 8, it adds a card view and a new titles view that displays more information for each item. The card view calls to mind a set of index cards, with the text-only posts just having the item title, summary and byline/publication info. Posts with graphics display all the summary info plus a random graphic from the post.

The so-called infinite view comes into play when you have a lot of items in your feeds. Instead of stopping at an arbitrary number of posts, you can simply keep scrolling through items as long as you have more posts to read.

If you haven't tried Feedly before, this would be a good time to check it out. You don't need to have a Google Reader account, there's a default set of feeds you can skim with Feedly even if you're not signed in. But I do recommend using it in conjunction with Google Reader. Note that Feedly syncs in real time with Google Reader, so changes made in Feedly should reflect in Google Reader as well.

The update is available immediately for Chrome and Safari, but the Firefox version is currently under review. Note that you can still install it, but you'll be warned that it could "harm your computer." For the cautious, I've installed Feedly 8 and thus far my computer seems unharmed.

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.

Feedly is not a social reader like Flipboard. It promotes its own topical "essentials," which are curated and well worth exploring, and then it pulls from Google Reader and rearranges the content, although today's update lets you add your Tumblr feed as well. But it offers an engrossing reading experience, and the sharing features make it easy to show articles to friends. Best of all, even though it's a free app, there's almost no intrusion into the minimal interface, since promoted content is Feedly's main revenue stream.

Check out the Feedly team's video on ways to customize your reading experience:

You can get Feedly for your platform of choice from the splash page on feedly.com.

What apps do you use to read your feeds? Share your favorites in the comments.

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.

Maybe We've Found the User Experience Problem...and Maybe it is Us.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says that the vast majority of Facebook users can't even be bothered to respond to friend requests - so maybe the day still isn't here when the web can ask anything of its users, even in exchange for the most fabulous functionality.

Maybe the web, maybe all of media, will always be a lean-back experience for the majority of humanity. That would be terrible, but I think it's far too soon to draw that conclusion.The new Pulse bookmarklet lets you save an article you find on the Web into a stream of links you can read later on your mobile device in Pulse.

It's a simple feature but an awfully smart one that more apps ought to support. It's almost silly that Pulse's little bookmark is getting as much media coverage as it is. But in the effort to make everything as simple as possible, to make sure that mainstream users can adopt new technologies better than they did the first wave of Web 2.0 (bookmarklets, RSS, wikis, podcasts) - a lot of functionality gets lost. It is possible that what these social technologies needed was a greater emphasis on design, not a radical decline in functionality. Pulse and Flipboard have a very different ratio of images to text than traditional feed readers - but why does that have to come with handcuffing users from adding their own articles or feeds easily into their readers?

Right now, if you're navigating around the web on your desktop, there's not a really simple, fast way to save an article to read in Flipboard later. That's silly.

Even with the addition of this new feature, Pulse remains hobbled by an inability to import large OPML files of RSS feeds.

It's great to see so much competition in this space; now let's see that competition heat up the pace of innovation and delivery of new features to users.

Taptu and Pulse

Taptu is a lot like Pulse, which is many peoples' favorite way to read news on an Android Tablet. I mean it's a lot like Pulse, now that it's no longer a mobile search app like it used to be.

The background colors are different. It syncs with social media accounts so you can read updates from LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter alongside topical and source-based feeds. Topic granularity is good, the interface is attractive and the app is free.

Syncing with Google Reader is limited to 100 feeds, which makes it of little use to me personally. Pulse is limited as well, but that might not matter to many other people.

FeedSquares

Feedsquares syncs with Google Reader and displays all your subscriptions and articles in an attractive interface of squares. Feedquares is also free and could be visually ideal for some users.

Feedly

Feedly syncs with Google Reader and has no limit to the number of feeds you can import. It offers updates in a very clean layout with more white space than any of the alternatives. It's a cross-platform app that also works on the iPad, iPhone and in desktop browsers. It's a smart, well-developed service. When the iPhone version launched in January, I said it might be the best mobile feed reader on the market.

Those are the best alternatives to Flipboard that I've been able to find for Android tablets. All of them are pretty good and I think Feedly is great. Many other people swear by Pulse. These aren't quite like the magazine type apps you see on iOS, but they can make for a great weekend afternoon of casual reading none the less.

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.

The layout of the app is simple. There is a small black bar on the bottom of the app that can control anything you want within the reader. You can Like, tweet, email, search directly from the app, copy article links or open in a browser from the bottom bar. One good function that we liked a lot was the inclusion of a button that will save articles to Instapaper or Read It Later. The tweet button has an automatic URL shortener, powered by Bit.ly.

In terms of user interface, Feedly for the iPad (where we tested it) has two choices - white background, black text or black background, white text. The ability to choose between on or the other is smart on Feedly's part. I prefer white text on black and found that the app was more enjoyable as a reader if I had the choice. You can scroll through articles from a source one by one with a swipe or through feeds on the browser page. One drawback is that the app is meant to run only in portrait mode which means if you are using it on a tablet you will not be able to use the standup option on your case.

Feedly is not going to run into any problems with publishers, the way Zite has. Since it is an RSS reader, it can bring in the ad stream of a blog or publisher through a partnership program the company has set up. In testing, multiple times we saw an ad spot within the reader that says "If you own this blog, contact us to enable your ad stream." Articles are rendered within the app with ads enabled and Feedly has held to the wishes of publishers who want their articles read in "web-only" mode.

Feedly may not be the most innovative or dynamic magazine application on the market. Flipboard is the leader in the category, Zite and Pulse both to fantastic apps in the mobile realm. In terms of functionality, simplicity and elegance, the Feedly reader can compete with anyone.

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.

To get a sense of what is currently popular, I polled followers of our @RWW Twitter account - along with followers of my own personal Twitter account @ricmacnz - about their favorite mobile RSS Reader.

5 services stood out as being the most popular among our readers. They were, in alphabetical order:

• Feedly (iPhone / Android)
• Google Reader (optimized for mobile in the browser)
• my6sense (iPhone / Android)
• Pulse (iPhone / Android)
• Reeder (iPhone)

mobileRSS (iPhone) and Byline (iPhone) were also mentioned multiple times.

User Experience of Mobile RSS Readers

Of the top 5 services according to RWW readers, the mobile version of Google Reader is the most conventional. It lists out your folders and feeds, then you click on them to scan and view stories. It works fairly well, although the main issue is that it's not as easy to scan stories as it is on a PC. That's not the fault of Google Reader. Rather it's the much smaller screen space on a smartphone, which means you end up spending a lot of time swiping and scrolling.

That in a nutshell is why RSS Readers have struggled to get take-up on smartphones. It's just too much work on a mobile phone to use an RSS Reader as it is intended, to scan hundreds or even thousands of feeds.

The other 4 services in our top 5 list have taken more innovative approaches to solve this problem. Although it should be noted that 3 of them use Google Reader as a platform for the actual feeds (Pulse is the only one not to).

My6sense filters your feeds and attempts to automatically select the most "relevant" stories to you. It also offers a time-based list of feeds and stories, but its main reason for being is to convert you to the relevance filter. So far this new type of feed reading hasn't taken off in a big way. It reminds me of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" option, in that you have to trust that the software will deliver you the results you want. I wonder whether modern Web users have the patience to build up that trust in my6sense.

Another app taking an innovative approach to mobile RSS Readers is Feedly, a personal favorite of ReadWriteWeb's resident RSS expert Marshall Kirkpatrick. Marshall reviewed Feedly in January, noting its "attractive folder-based navigation that's easy to thumb through horizontally." Similar to my6sense, Feedly filters your feeds. In Feedly's case, it uses a popularity metric to pick out key items. For example, in my 'Internet of Things' folder from Google Reader, Feedly selected two pages worth of items to show me (9 items, to be exact).

Work in Progress

In conclusion, it's fair to say that RSS reading on smartphones is not yet a solved problem. There is no efficient way to scan through hundreds of feeds on a mobile phone, so apps like my6sense and Feedly have chosen to take a filtering approach.

It's partly a software issue. Filtering is a mix of art and science; it's hard to get it right. But also it's a shift in user experience. RSS Readers never really became mainstream on computers and those who do use them - power users or people who need to track information for their job - haven't yet become comfortable with RSS Readers filtering their feeds. Web users have become accustomed to letting people filter information via Twitter or Facebook, so perhaps it's just a matter of time before they let software do filtering too.

Let us know in the comments if you use an RSS Reader on your smartphone; and if so what your experience has been like.

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 is much more than just another way to read feeds. Although it originally got its start as an alternative UI to Google Reader, today the service is part RSS reader, part social network aggregator and part search utility. Since its launch in 2008, Feedly's developer Edwin Khodabakchian has constantly added new features including Twitter and FriendFeed integrations, a river of news view, search tools, Mozilla Ubiquity integration, a Feedly "mini" toolbar and so much more.

Once installed, a click of a browser button transports you to the Feedly start page where you can browse through the latest news, comment, star, share, discuss and search through the articles displayed. As you read through the items, your activity is seamlessly synced back to Google Reader.

Although voracious RSS readers who subscribe to thousands of feeds may find using Feedly a bit slower than using Google Reader itself, a good many of the more casual consumers of RSS prefer Feedly's clean, easy-to-scan interface to Google Reader's more utilitarian look and feel.

Feedly for Chrome

The new Chrome version of Feedly is virtually identical to the one available for Firefox with only two major exceptions: there is no Gmail integration or Feedly mini toolbar available in the Chrome version just yet. The toolbar is one of Feedly's many innovative features which provides a floating bar that hovers at the bottom of your screen as you surf through blogs on the web. Toolbar buttons show you various pieces of metadata about the blog post you're reading, including number of Diggs and number of Google Reader shares. You can also save or share the post yourself in Google Reader or tweet a link to the article, among other things.

However, according to Khodabakchian, Feedly mini's omission isn't due to any technical issues. Instead, he notes in the comments of a Feedly blog post that the mini toolbar is in the process of being redesigned and when the Firefox version is complete and stable, he will then look into building a toolbar for Chrome. The estimated timeframe for its inclusion into the Chrome beta is 6-8 weeks.

How to Install Feedly for Chrome

In order to run Feedly for Chrome, you'll need to first install a dev build of the Google Chrome browser. These dev ("developer") versions of Chrome aren't as stable as the public release but allow you to play with yet-to-launch features like Google Chrome extensions, for example. And for Mac and Linux users, the dev release is your only option because Google has yet to provide stable versions of Chrome for those two operating systems as of yet.

After installing the dev release, you'll need to add the new Feedly extension to the browser.

Here's how to get started:

1. Download and install the Chrome 4.0 Dev Channel: Windows | Mac | Linux 32-bit | Linux 64-bit
2. Restart Chrome to make sure that you are running the 4.0 version.
3. Load http://update.feedly.com/release/feedly.crx to install Feedly.
4. Click on the Feedly icon on the chrome toolbar to load your Feedly.

After you have Feedly up-and-running, you can receive support through the company's Get Satisfaction page or by emailing feedly-chrome AT devhd.com. You can also tweet @feedly_chrome with questions, comments, and other feedback.

We're beyond excited to see Feedly on Chrome - although it was relatively easy to give up most of our Firefox extensions when we made the move to the Chrome browser, Feedly was one of the few that was sorely missed. However, if you're a more cautious user hesitant to install test builds of your browser and experimental extensions, you may not have to wait much longer before you can play with fully functional and stable versions of both. Yesterday, Google put out the call for developers to begin submitting their extensions for inclusion in the upcoming Chrome extension gallery, a step that signifies that this feature is closer than ever to launching. When the time comes, we're sure that Feedly will be among the top-rated extensions found there.

Most recently, Feedly has been working on enhancing the functionality of Feedly Mini (which we cover here) to go beyond being a convenient place to share the page you are currently reading. Previously, the occasional mysterious topic result would appear if you were on a page relating to, say, politics or movies. Now, that feature has been expanded and refined to work on any search query on certain sites, like Google or Amazon. Feedly quickly brings up a weighted result list of discussions and links, along with a link to the originating sites. The search that is performed is done on the client, and no search data is being sent back to Feedly, Google Reader or any other service. The new feature, just like Feedly mini itself, can be turned off in Feedly options as well.

Overall, the new search feature is nicely implemented and we think it will come in very useful. We do have one small wish though, to cover those corner cases where you might be searching for something, say an article on Wikipedia or a product on eBay that you want to share with your friends on Twitter or Friendfeed.. in those cases, we want both the functions of Feedly Mini on the same page - search and share buttons. But for the moment we can't figure out how to turn that on. It either does one or the other, depending on what site you are on.

Newspapers have always looked for alternative distribution mechanisms, and Popular Mechanics reports that as early as in 1939 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tested the idea of electronically sending newspapers to customers' homes. Martin Langeveld discusses the history - and failure - of personalized and faxed newspapers on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog in some more detail.

Giving Readers a Choice

MediaNews' Peter R. Vandevanter, however, seems completely unmoved by the earlier failures of this idea. In an interview with the New York Times, he argues that "individuated news" - MediaNews' trademarked term for this idea - will give readers the ability to "decide what they want to read and on what platform." Of course, readers already have this choice, and, in large numbers, they have made the choice that print is not the medium they are interested in. We also can't imagine that too many readers would want to have yet another printer at home that is dedicated to nothing else but printing the morning paper.

As Andrew Smith of the Dallas Morning News argues, all newspapers have to do is simply provide readers with customized feeds for their online readers. Then, if you really want to print your individualized newspaper, you could just use a free tool like FeedJournal  - and you don't even have to put yet another proprietary device into your house. Of course, if you already use Google Reader and you want a magazine-style feed reader that you can use to read on your screen, Feedly is the way to go.

CC-licensed image of dead trees used courtesy of Flickr users piglicker.

In this latest version, the metadata you're able to see includes the number of FriendFeed conversations, the number of Diggs, and the number of times the post has been shared in Google Reader or Feedly. To the right of those informational icons are more buttons that let you share the post in Google Reader/Feedly, save the page for later reading (star in Google Reader), Twitter the page, or email it to a friend.

When you've finished reading (and interacting) with the content on your screen, there's a "next" button which you can click to go to the next recommendation in your Feedly/Google Reader.

Integrated Twitter and FriendFeed

In addition to providing tools that help you better understand and share the blog posts you read, Feedly also reminds you how you came across them in the first place. If you originally saw the post on Twitter, a small notification will pop-up to remind you of that tweet and on the notification window there's an option to reply or re-tweet the information directly from the web page you're currently on.

Alternately, if the article you're reading is hot on FriendFeed, Feedly Mini's pop-up will notify you of a popular conversation around the blog's content occurring on FriendFeed. With one click, you can then join that conversation.

If you're not a fan of notifications or just want to dial them back a bit, you can do so from a preference knob called "Mini Friendfeed Notifications" which allows you to control and customize the behavior of these notifications.

How To Get It

All these new features will be made available today as part of a Feedly update to v 1.2 patch 170. If you're not seeing these features yet, don't worry - Feedly is good about delivering automatic updates to their users. In other words, you can install Feedly now, then sit back and wait for the magic to happen. If you do end up trying the new version, you can let @feedly on Twitter know what you think. If you run into any problems, you can log it on get satisfaction where every ticket is responded to within 24 hours.

You never know what Feedly will add next. Past updates includes integration with Ubiquity, integration with your Google Search, and more. Based on the image below, it appears that Twitter and FriendFeed are only the start of Feedly's planned integrations for this increasingly useful tool.

Besides being able to quickly send a link to Twitter, one feature we really like is feedly's integration with Open Calais, Thomson Reuter's semantic web service. Feedly's Calais command overlays semantic metadata on the current page and then links to a page on feedly with related stories from your RSS subscriptions, Delicious, YouTube, and Twitter.

Commands

Feedly's developer Edwin Khodabkchian notes that he will add more commands soon. Here are all the feedly commands that are currently availably in Ubiquity:

Ambient News is a new Firefox add-on written by Mozilla developer Atul Varma and is currently available as an alpha release. The add-on tracks your browsing habits, learning which sites you visit most frequently. It then pulls the headlines in from those sites and displays them for you in a beautifully fading list every time you open a new tab in Firefox. If you see something that interests you, just click the link and you'll be taken to the web site where the headline originated. Privacy advocates, rest assured - no data is shared outside your browser.

Intelligent Agents to the Rescue!

As Michael Calore of Wired notes, the add-on is a great workaround for the biggest usability problem facing RSS. "Many people don't know what it is or how to take advantage of it," he writes. "The first hint that a feed exists is a funky orange or blue icon. Click on it and, in most cases, you get prompted to load another application. Sometimes, you just see ugly, raw XML output."

But since we're mostly web geeks here at ReadWriteWeb, we're more enthralled with another aspect to this tool: its intelligence. As we mentioned not too long ago, cloud agents are on the rise. The term, coined by blogger Chris Arkenberg, refers to automated agents that help us better deal with the volumes of data we have to sort through every day. Although Ambient News isn't necessary a full-on cloud agent - it doesn't actually work in the cloud - it can still certainly be considered an agent, especially since it helps us sort through a barrage of information in a new way.

Other Alternatives

Ambient News is not the only alternative to the traditional RSS Reader. Over the past year at ReadWriteWeb, we've also made mention of other alternative news readers like Feedly, which puts a magazine-style interface on top of Google Reader. Another popular RSS reader is Snackr, an Adobe AIR app that scrolls headlines across your screen like a news ticker. Then there is, of course, FriendFeed, a lifestreaming application that's quickly becoming an alternative way to share information among the early adopter set.

Alternative RSS readers aren't for everyone, though - journalists, bloggers, researchers, and the like may still need to use a jam-packed feed reader in order to seek out the elusive info they seek on a regular basis. But for those of you who are more casual web surfers and blog readers, alternative RSS readers are a less stressful way to get your news without the news getting to you.

Feedly's River of News

This new river view offers the following features:

• Longer lists of 200+ articles, loaded on demand as you scroll.
• Ability to set various type of filters: unread, category, subscription.
• Keyboard shortcuts - the same as Google Reader
• Ability to click on the summary of an article and expand it inline.
• Ability to play video and listen to podcasts directly from the list.
• Google Reader-like ability to automatically mark articles as read while scrolling
• Summize-like notifications when new articles are published.

Now even sophisticated RSS users can have the best of both worlds - quick access to all of Feedly's features while also being able to scan the news almost as fast as in Google Reader itself.

If you're a Firefox and Google Reader user and you haven't yet installed the Feedly plugin, you're going to want to install it today after you hear this: Feedly has now integrated its own results - that is, links to the relevant posts from your Google Reader - right into your Google search results. This integration essentially adds a layer of social search directly into Google, and all with no extra work on your part besides simply having installed the plugin.

To get you up to speed, Feedly is a service and a Firefox plugin that provides an alternative way to read your feeds. Its magazine-style interface presents the news to you in a more visually appealing way while still keeping it categorized by your own tagging system. As your read news items in Feedly, they're marked as read in Google Reader; as you "Recommend" items in Feedly, they're "Shared" in Google Reader; as you "Annotate," they're shared with a note, etc.

However, for voracious RSS readers like myself, Feedly is a much slower way to read the news, which is perhaps why it hasn't really taken off to a great extent among the early adopter set. That's a shame, though, because Feedly can do so much more than many people may realize.

For one, it's integrated with both Twitter and FriendFeed letting you tweet or share an item on either of those services (even FriendFeed rooms)with just one click. It also pulls in the blog comments, comments from Digg, and the FriendFeed conversations surrounding an article and lets you add your own thoughts to FriendFeed stream - without you having to view the page on FriendFeed itself.

Although it does show full feeds (just like Google Reader), it also allows blog owners to showcase their sponsors via a designated ad spot. On an area called "The Wall," you have the option to configure the page to show a mix of recommended items from Google Reader plus other sources. Those other sources can include your Firefox Bookmarks, your MyYahoo items, items from NetVibes, and items from Bloglines, as well as social connections like your Twitter stream, your FriendFeed stream, items from Yahoo Mail or Gmail. You can also select "best of" content to be mixed in from any number of categories from fashion to celebrities to tech or you can even upload your own OPML file.

Feedly Secrets

There are still a few secrets to discover about Feedly though. Despite all that it does, you may be surprised to know what more it's capable of. One of the biggest undiscovered gems is that as you "follow" friends on Feedly, you are immediately tapped into their Google Reader Shared Items - even if you're not "Google Friends." Their shared items will show up in Google Reader in a folder called "z.feedly.people." This is great for those who don't use Gmail or GTalk but still want access to people's Google Reader Shares. Friending people right now is somewhat of a difficult process because you have to find users on your own - there's no search feature for finding people. However, this friends feature is said to be getting an overhaul soon and we're looking forward to checking out.

Spring cleaning is a feature available from the "more" option that helps you eliminate the feeds you don't read. The interface color codes feeds to let you know how much you like them. The colors are as follows:

• Red: A candidate for deletion because you are not reading articles from the feed and/or the feed does not seem to produce articles.

• Orange: Produces a lot more than you are reading

• Green: You seem to like those feeds a lot.

• White: Everything else

Feedly + Google Search Integration

But today's big news is the Feedly+Google Search integration. As you search for a subject in Google, Feedly search results will appear at the top of the page. At present, the search results will only appear if you have related RSS items 7 days old or less (which explains why I had not yet seen this before).

This integration adds an immediate social filtering aspect to searching the web by promoting your favorite sources to the top of your search results. It even takes into account your reading patterns and the favorite metadata to sort the results.

With this feature, it doesn't even matter if you want to use Feedly to read feeds - this behind-the-scenes social filtering makes it a killer add-on for anyone who uses Firefox and Google Reader. You can download Feedly from here.