Friday, October 8, 2010

Feedlooks: A New, Convenient Way to Read Your RSS Feeds

Feedlooks: A New, Convenient Way to Read Your RSS FeedsFeedlooks is a new RSS reader that focuses on convenience and simplicity. Though it does not offer a lot of complex or advanced features, the quick speed of the site and nicely designed interface makes it a tool worth using.

When you first sign up, you will automatically be subscribed to a few blogs. I’m not sure how the blogs are chosen or if everyone gets the same blogs. I had three entertainment blogs added to my list. You can, of course, remove the blogs if they do not interest you. Your home window (where your folders and feeds are displayed) will also be opened by default.

Feedlooks home window.

You can add new feeds by clicking on the “add feed” button, as well as add new folders by clicking on the plus button (both in the home window). If you already use Google Reader, you can also import your feeds. First you’ll need to download your feeds file to your computer and then upload it to Feedlooks. This can be done in two simple steps right from the Feedlooks site. Under the “More” menu you can also customize the color of the navigation bar (six colors to choose from), change or reset your password and contact the company.

In Feedlooks there isn’t a “mark as read” option.

“Instead of the Read vs. Unread model used in e-mail clients, Feedlooks adopts the much simpler model “New vs. Old”, which is more suited to reading news and feeds. Once you are done checking your posts, simply hit the Refresh button in the Feedlooks toolbar and your current items (New) will be automatically moved to the Archives (Old).”

The neat thing about Feedlooks is that clicking on a feed item opens it in the background of the current tab/window.

Feedlooks top bar view with feeds and folders.

The top navigation bar will remain at the top of the page so that you can go back to your feeds or perform other actions found on the bar.

Feedlooks top bar view without feeds and folders.

From the navigation bar you can:

  • View your RSS feed count
  • Show/hide the home window.
  • Keep the current post marked as new.
  • Refresh your feeds.
  • Go to the previous or next post shown in your home window.
  • Pin/unpin the current post for later reading.
  • Open the current item in new window.
  • Share the post by email, Facebook, Twitter or other sites care of AddThis.
  • View settings.
  • Log out.

The only thing that kind of bugs me about Feedlooks is that since “an item is considered ‘New’ if it has been added to Feedlooks since the last time you checked,” this could create some frustration. See, if you happen to close out or navigate away from Feedlooks by accident or even on purpose (without reading all of your new items), then all of those new items will be archived. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to get to the archived posts, but it can still be a little annoying having all of your new posts out of site just like that. Others may find this very convenient though.

All-in-all I find Feedlooks very useful and see it as a possible replacement (personally) for Google Reader. What do you think?

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