Why go to the web when you can get the web to come to you?
In week 5 of the Social Media Driving Licence we looked at several tools to help create and control your social media and web experience. One of those tools was Feedly.
Probably not the most ‘social media-y’ of the social media tools we’ve looked at in the SMDL Feedly allows you to create your own personalized homepage to the web, drawing together blogs, articles, news headlines and much more into a single interface no matter how diverse your interests are.
It will aggregate your news content, read your RSS feeds and can use social media to connect you to what’s important. Since Google decided to put its own RSS aggregator Google Reader out to pasture Feedly provides an excellent alternative to give you your personalized gateway to web content that interests you.
The main benefit of this service has to be the time it can save. By bringing the content that interests you together you no longer have to spend the time jumping around the web checking sites individually. If you follow blogs you don’t need to keep checking ad-hoc for new posts, just follow and wait for those new stories to pop up on your Feedly homepage.
The site design could probably be best described as minimalist in look, but rather than being a negative this allows your chosen content to shine through and also makes it simple to set-up and interact with.
Logging in using an existing account from any major web service such as Google, Facebook or Twitter allows you to get started instantly without the need to remember yet another account name and password. Once in just search and add content either through the preexisting subject categories or simply pasting the URL of the site that interests you in the search box.
You can theme your content by subject, either using the topics suggested by Feedly or create your own headings – so if extreme knitting, milk bottle collecting and/or competitive dog grooming happen to be what interests you then you can set up a section dedicated to each.
The site will allow you 
to connect the content you’ve selected to your social media channels, tweet a link to an an interesting blog post directly from the Feedly homepage. There are also convenient Android and iOS apps that allow you to look at your content on the go.
Would it be considered an essential tool for accessing the web? No. But will it enhance your web experience and save you time? Almost certainly yes.
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