#blogjune Day 2 To Feedly or not to Feedly

Well it is nearly crunch time with Google Reader and I needed to start making some decisions about whether I really wanted to continue with a feed reader. I had decided previously that if I did I was going to go with Feedly.  But did I really want a feed reader?

Once upon a time I read Bloglines daily and really relied upon it for my professional reading, news, food blogs, local and family history, film, news. You name it.  It was such a useful way to get digests of everything I wanted.  Well, actually mostly it is fair to say, as I still subscribe and regularly use a couple of old-fashioned listservs that I have been using since 2000.

Then I started to use Bloglines more erratically and things would bank up.  @shewgirl and I used to have an ongoing joke about it. I had started to realize the benefit of Twitter and was starting to get most (but definitely not all) from there.  I migrated my feeds to Google Reader once Bloglines was foundering but despite the fact that I could access these on my iThings I rarely look at them.  I tend to get my reading from Twitter, a bit from Facebook and I subscribe to a few Paperli magazines to get a broad flavour.  And, of course, there is Flipboard.

However, last night I read a Twitter conversation about the blogs for #blogjune.  These people were just adding all the #blogjune blog urls to Feedly.  Hmm, did I want to do that? So I thought about it.  I must say one of the uses I still saw for a feed reader was for reviewing blogposts.  One can subscribe to blogs and get individual email alerts.  I do that with some blogs, particularly if there is a discussion going on that I want to stay part of, but I don't really want to flood my email inbox with lots more emails.

So last night while I was playing with my phone as I watched #aflcatssuns on television I loaded up the iPhone app for Feedly.  What next?  Ah I just had to connect to Google to sync all my folders and contents. I added a couple of blog urls that I had been reading.  It all seemed quite an easy interface.  Today I investigated it on Firefox and loaded it on my desktop. Again the way in was syncing with Google. It's a pretty bare desktop interface but not to worry as I really want to use it on the go and the app has obviously had more work done on it.

I am experimenting but I think that I probably will use it to monitor feeds from blogs - once I tidy it up a bit and get rid of stuff I no longer want or stuff I get elsewhere.  I also need to investigate what happens when Google stops supporting Google Reader.  At the moment I get into Feedly via syncing with that.  Presumably there will be changed arrangements. I also have a feeling that this may be a topic later for #anz23mthings so that will provide me with an opportunity to review the situation.