The future of feed reading
It’s been a while since I used iGoogle. Initially, I liked the way it took my feeds into a single, multi-column display — separated into discrete blocks depending on their source, and then contextualised by tabs — and I was particularly impressed with its customisation options, which let me drag and drop elements, add applications and pull in my email. It wasn’t great, but it had a workmanlike vibe to it.
But after a while, my iGoogle page began to languish. It was certainly getting better in every way — faster, more applications — but I rarely had a good reason to visit it. The romance just kind of died, but not for any real reason I could articulate at the time. It’s like how I just decided to stop watching Lost a couple of years ago — superficially, it’s a show I should love, but it was conceptually wrong for me.
On reflection, though, it’s clear why I left iGoogle. First, I’m a voracious consumer of information and I need something far more powerful and reading-friendly (yet also browser-based) than iGoogle, and Google Reader is hands down the best tool for the job. Second, and more importantly, I only wanted to subscribe to feeds and give them a minimal structure, rather than think about how all those elements were presented. iGoogle forced me to think about the presentation by having me indicate precisely where an element should go — and consequently, where everything else should sit in relation to it — for every item.
Essentially, you could say it was a high maintenance relationship — it required more work than I cared to put in — but it’s worth thinking about what that actually means for ‘feed reading’ in general, and where things might be headed.
What feed reading is
From the reader’s point of view, the process of reading (or interacting with) feeds can be broken down into three steps:
Selecting a feed (“I want to read more of this”)
Structuring the content (“I will tag this feed as X/put it in folder Y/prioritise it as Z/share with person A”)
Presenting the content (“And here’s how I want to view this content”)
The problem is, I’m only interested in 1 and 2. I am interested in 3, but, as mentioned, not all the damn time. Furthermore, the structure should influence the presentation, and to the extent that the presentation can be done automatically, then that’s how I’d prefer it.
Not everyone is the same. Some like end-to-end control and will constantly curate the structure and presentation. Others couldn’t care less — they’ve probably never heard of a ‘feed’ and they’re happy to outsource that job to an editorial authority, such as a mainstream newspaper, community aggregation service or even just a printed magazine.
So, coming back to me. Google Reader is far and away the best at 1 and 2, but it doesn’t do 3. Although I’m not overly fussed about it, I’d like to have the option to present that content effectively and situationally, but that also leverages off Google Reader.
And this is where Feedly comes in.
Structure to presentation
I stumbled on Feedly by way of a Chrome browser extension and it’s fair to say I was blown away by it. Not by its design or layout, or by its magazineness (using terms like ‘cover’ for the front page doesn’t do anything for me) but by how it took all the work I’d already done in Google Reader and arranged it according to basic design principles.
If you’ve not used Google Reader, it might sound like Feedly just takes a bunch of feeds and rearranges them on another webpage. That’s true, but it uses the structure and behavioural data (e.g., sharing and starring) gleaned from Google Reader as the engine, which in turn drives how Feedly presents the information. If you don’t like the page layout, you can swap between different styles of magazinelike grids, newspaper columns, summaries, and so on. Plus, it’ll also reconfigure its presentation based on the device you’re using.
In other words, it’s not asking me to do more work, or overriding the work I enjoy doing (i.e. steps 1 and 2). Rather, it’s only interested in step 3, which means it complements my reading style and habits. It may not be the first to do so (it’s been around for a while), but this is clearly the start of something much bigger. And with the iPad and web-friendly tablets on the way, I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this stuff soon.
