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I don’t usually get excited so quickly for a new service I try, expecially if, at first sight, it seems a “me too“. Well, I have to say that Feedly is the exception and it’s pretty unique. After having used it for about one hour, I’m already addicted to it and can’t wait to share it with my readers.

Feedly is a Firefox extension which provides you with a whole new experience to the way you consume news from Google Reader. Google Reader is great but Feedly offers so many improvements that you’ll never miss it in terms of user interface.

First of all we have to say that Feedly relies completely on Google Reader and it is synchronized with it. That said, any action you perform on Feedly is automatically translated into the correspondent in Google Reader.

Secondly, sharing news on Twitter or Friendfeed has never been easier. You can also “like” an article or post to Friendfeed/Twitter directly from within Feedly.

The other great fact about Feedly is the way it brings the news to you. There are many different views available and many filters so that you can make sure only the most relevant news are highlighted and shown to you and when you have many hundred RSS subscriptions, this feature becomes particularly useful.

Another great option is the list of the top readers of certain blogs your read. For example, when I click on any specific Google Reader tag, i can see a box on the right with the top readers of the news which are tagged that way.

Feedly also provides you with a great way to perform a “springcleaning” of your feeds, highlighting the feeds where there is less activity or that you read less….

… but it also recommends new sources you could be interested in according to what currently read.

There is much more with Feedly (like The Wall, the annotation tool, APIs… ) and I highly recommend to check it out. For eager consumers of news and people addicted to social media, Feedly is a must have.

My guess? I wouldn’t be surprised to see Feedly as part of Google very soon, too.

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Technorati Tags: facebook, feedly, friendfeed, GoogleReader, luca filigheddu, RSS, twitter

One of the new features appeared in the new Facebook interface is the Live Feed. Through this functionality, you can get a realtime update of your friends’ activities, wathever they are doing within Facebook or in other services integrated with it (Twitter, Friendfeed, Applications etc.).

How far is this new service from FriendFeed? I’d say really not much. You can filter the type of updates you want to get and leave comments to those. Or you can even get the updates coming from Friendfeed only too. The only missing feature is the “Like” one, something that lets Friendfeed bring the most “liked” stories (as well as the most commented ones) to the top, giving them a “rate” in terms of popularity.

The real question here is how many virtual worlds users would deal with. Facebook is a huge online operating system with an enormous user base, so why I should care to FriendFeed too? And, if it weren’t enough, you can take a look at Pulse or MyBlogLog for other interesting updates from your contacts.

The only difference among these “status updates” should be the type of contacts those updates belong to. MyBlogLog brings together the community of readers of your blog, Pulse is more a business thing (is it?) while Facebook IS “THE” social network (LinkedIn has its “What are you working on” thing, too). The risk is that with the “status update mania” some services could loose their focus and, time after time, becoming something different (look at MyBlogLog, for instance).

The other important thing that is worth to be pointed out is that, at the end of the day, we are always dealing with the same contacts everywhere, so how to avoid duplicate content in this already crowded digital social universe? Friendfeed is the best example here. People updating their status with services like Ping.fm or HelloTXT are filling FriendFeed with the same content coming from different sources, so I find an entire page where my friend XYZ tells me that he’s doing this or that, with different icons representing the different services he is updating. So what? Boring.

That being said, only time will tell, but it’s pretty clear that users start looking for a sort of “social networks consolidation” and for an efficient way to limit the enormous quantity of content they consume everyday. Me too… what about you?

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Technorati Tags: facebook, friendfeed, Hellotxt, Jaiku, Live Feed, luca filigheddu, Ping.fm, Social network, status update, twitter

Just realized that a new beta version of Friendfeed has been released a couple of days ago.

I’m testing it out, I’ll post my impressions soon.

I haven’t seen anything special so far, but I need more time to test it better.

Technorati Tags: friendfeed, luca filigheddu, Social Media

A new “whale” coming?

Technorati Tags: friendfeed, luca filigheddu

A few days ago I wrote about a problem related to the wide availability of tools which let you share your lifestream, like FriendFeed. You post something on your blog, for example, and realize that people are leaving comments on it through FriendFeed.

A solution? This fantastic FriendFeed plugin for Wordpress which lets you pull any comment on FriendFeed and show them on the correspondent post on your blog. This way, you are able to put together all the elements of the conversation around your article.

You can find a test example here. I left a comment on FriendFeed to one of my blog posts and it appears on my blog too. You also have the ability to leave a comment on FriendFeed directly from this blog.

You can download this plugin from here. Check it out, it’s really worth it.

Technorati Tags: friendfeed, luca filigheddu, plugin, wordpress

You post on your blog, Wordpress notifies this to your Twitter account, people see it because your Facebook status automatically changes showing the Twitter message and they leave a comment to that post on FriendFeed.

Someone said that the “conversation” is moving to FriendFeed, but right now I call it a real mess, since I was not following FriendFeed and I lost those comments.

Technorati Tags: facebook, friendfeed, luca filigheddu, twitter

Do you want all your friends’ feeds delivered straight to your desktop?  If the answer is yes, you should try this new AIR application developed by Howard Baines.

As most AIR apps, the GUI is stunning and it seems very well done. I like apps like that since they improve the way you interact with such services (Twihrl and Twitterrific are two other examples) and I’m going to install it right now. 

Check it out and leave your comments.

Technorati Tags: alert thingy, friendfeed, howard baines, luca filigheddu