Advocate's Studio

Content manipulators rejoice! Your favorite web extension for Google Reader, Feedly, has finally made its long-awaited debut on the iPhone (link here)! And, in a word, it ROCKS!

I have covered Feedly and the promised iPhone version many times here in the Studio. Apps come and go, but Feedly has been a constant companion ever since I started reading RSS and blogging and I couldn’t live without it. Feedly is a browser extension that works in Firefox, Chrome and Safari (I have it in all three browsers) that syncs with your Google Reader account – your GReader stories are pulled by Feedly and actions taken in either GReader or Feedly are reflected in the other service. Feedly wins with an outstanding magazine-style layout, relevance weighting of news articles based on your reading and sharing habits and very simple to use tools for saving, sharing, commenting, and otherwise playing with the great stories found among Feedly’s greatest hits.  You can display the latest updates from feeds, blogs, and sites like Facebook and Twitter – pretty much anything with an RSS feed you can subscribe to in Reader. Feedly integrates with Delicious, Amazon.com, YouTube, and other sites as well, showing that content alongside the news stories. It offers numerous ways to add, filter, display, mark, and share content. Ultimately, Feedly delivers your own personal magazine digest of everything you’re interested in, or might be interested in, since Feedly also does a good job of suggesting content.

I have longed for the iPhone version for quite some time and, following a tip on the Feedly blog, I was able to secure an advance copy of the iPhone app last fall.  I have been playing with it ever since.

Up front, Feedly for iPhone is not the full-function Feedly web, nor should it be. The mobile app gets to the very heart of what I use Feedly for – blowing through the top content in my Google Reader folders, save what I want, share what I want and mark the content read. Feedly for iPhone also takes full advantage of the iPhone’s tactile interface, with swiping right or left to access the story headlines, swiping up or down to mark read or unread.

The app shows the digest of all articles, most recent articles, featured sources (what Feedly thinks you should read), the most popular items from the Feedly community and saved items.  The deeper you delve into one of your Feedly categories, the less recent the story. You can like items with the thumbs up and mark the entire feed read by clicking the check mark at the bottom.

There is no faster way for me to wade through my Google Reader streams than Feedly and I find it even faster on the iPhone. Plus, there is the “here and now” factor of having the app on the phone so that I can read and share a little when I am between events or meetings on the go.

Developer and founder Ed Khodabakchian has been very accessible and responsive to comments and suggestions on the interface. They really seem dedicated to providing the best possible experience with this app and it shows.

If you use Google Reader, then you owe it to yourself to try Feedly. If you are an iPhone user (or iPad user  - it works on that too with the 2x zoom), you can get a very full Feedly experience in the mobile domain. And, if you are an Android user, don’t despair – the Android client is coming soon to a mobile phone near you!

Now that I have an iPad, with lots of great PDF reader applications, including iBooks, I am a lot more interested in collecting PDFs to read on that fantastic facilitator of information consumption. Joliprint (link here) has made the process of making web content, particularly Google Reader more readable, by dropping it into your PDF reader with the ease of a bookmarklet.

All you have to do is grab the bookmarklet via the link above. Then, while you are browsing through Google Reader, select the desired post, hit the bookmarklet in your Favorites bar and voila! Instant PDF. Great for printing and reading. Once you have it, simply email it to yourself, open the attachment on your iPad and select the reader you want your PDF sent to.

That’s easy!

Although I am a die-hard Google Reader fan, it is always nice to welcome a new RSS news reader to the fold and expand the options. Good Noows (link here), a web-based reader, has the slick look of Feedly with lots of customization tools  and social sharing buttons. Interestingly, you cannot sign up for Good Noows directly. Instead, you use your social log-ins from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo or LinkedIn.

Be aware that, unlike Feedly, Good Noows is not tied to your Google Reader subscriptions. You must select your topics and sources within the application. Your news options do vary based on your location. In addition to the offered choices, you can insert custom feeds from your own favorite sources. Make sure you de-select the default options that you are not interested in, as Good Noows automatically subscribes you to recommended sources, just to get your started.

There are nine different formatting options for your news blurbs, all of which are nicely laid out and easy to navigate. I like the auto-translate feature – click a button to translate your entire page into another language. As with other readers, clicking on the item ultimately sends you through to the original article.

There is searching and filtering within streams for specific terms, which are called “labels” and can be added as buttons for quick access to your desired content.  In addition to the usual sharing options, you can share links from Good Noows in a chat format, powered by Meebo.

If you are a chat junkie, this last feature may make Good Noows a first place choice. For the rest of us, Good Noows might offer a different view of the news and may fit your needs better than the old standby.

I use Instapaper, an off-line reading tool, but not as much as I should. I use Google Reader, an on-line RSS reader, but I often don’t have the time to devote the proper attention to every interesting article. In Reader, I “star” a lot of articles that I plan to go back and consume later, but many times, later never comes.

Enter InstaReader, a free plug-in that bridges the gap. Lifehacker tipped me to the tool, which can be found here. Simply feed the RSS feed from your Google Reader starred items into InstaReader on your desktop and it will automatically update Instapaper with your starred items every few minutes. Load Instapaper into your iPhone, remember to sync before you go off-line and your are good to go!

In my humble opinion, the single best source of information both on and off the Web is a healthy collection of news and blog feeds automatically pouring into Google Reader. But, much like my tangible desktop, briefcase and magazine bin, my virtual periodical inbox is stuffed full to bursting. It can’t be helped: I see an interesting post or feed and I MUST subscribe. My pack rat mentality flows over into virtual space. Dozens of feeds and thousands of posts later, I lose complete site of the bottom of the pile.

So I welcomed this morning a post from Lifehacker (link here) with tips on how to tame the tangle mass that is my Google Reader inbox. Some tips I knew, but others were fresh and I immediately applied them. For example, use the “Trends” button underneath “Your Stuff” in the left hand column to quickly view the least updated, most obscure or least attended-to feeds and lose them like a bad habit. Lifehacker also suggests creating a folder system that encourages you to spend more time on the stuff you want: consider folders called “favorites” containing all your must-read subscriptions, then tier the remaining content in order of importance or subject matter. I employ a subject-based foldering system, but I do tier my Reader follows into “Top Peeps” and all the rest.

Another great tip for the higher order geek is using Yahoo! Pipes (link here) to further customize your feeds with built-in filtering. Another, somewhat simpler, option is FeedRinse (link here), which strains by author, tags, and keywords. Lifehacker reminds that WordPress feeds also offer tagging – in other words, if you are reading a WP blog within a particular category, simply add /feed/ to the end of the URL and you can secure a feed of only that category.

The Lifehacker article finally spurred me to start the long overdue Spring feed cleaning that I had contemplated for some time. It didn’t hurt my momentum when I learned this morning that the Reeder app on my iPhone stops updating when there are 5,000 unread items. Oops.