Feedly: searching and the social layer

Let’s get it out of the way now: I like Feedly; in fact, I love it. Aside from being an absolutely essential tool for my work (I would find it very hard otherwise to monitor the contents of more than 50 websites daily without it), I like the way it stepped into the space left vacant by Google Reader, the way it put its users interests first when it came to developing its functionality as a business model, and I am fascinated by the dedication it devotes to interacting with those users. Each and every one of my “moments of truth” in conversations with people at Feedly, on occasions initiated by them, and on others by me, have been a real pleasure.

Feedly is, without doubt, the page I spend the most time on, and is the key to my productivity. I simply cannot understand why RSS readers are not used by everybody. I think that any user, from the professional to the casual, can benefit from having a series of information sources, pages, and alerts set up in an orderly manner in a feeds reader. Each time I explain the concept to a class, my students seem very interested, but I then notice that they very few of them bother to adopt the habit.

I have recently begun to try out two new Feedly features: the first is called Collection sharing, which allows me to let others know about the sites I follow by putting them into a separate folder. This function is still…