In Pursuit of Mysteries

Friendly Feedly

During the last day, I’ve been playing with a Firefox extension called “Feedly.” The home page for the extension is at feedly.com. As the extension describes itself:

Feedly is a new kind of RSS start page which weaves Google Reader, Digg and Delicious into a more fun, magazine-like user experience. The integration with Twitter, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Friendfeed and Delicious makes sharing a breeze. You can get up to speed quickly by importing your existing Netvibes, Bloglines or MyYahoo accounts, your bookmarks or an OPML file.

What it does is act as a new way of viewing your feed content for those of us who read a lot of blogs (I scan at least 200, though some of those only update once a week). It uses Google Reader as its backend for accessing your feeds. For me, this is very convenient because I was already using Google Reader. This means that it reads my existing reader subscriptions, including folder organization, and presents views on it. When I mark items as read, save them for later, or share them, this is reflected on the Google Reader site. This makes it perfect for me and very easy for others to try if they are already playing with Google Reader.

Feedly offers various roll up views of top readers for blogs or other Google Reader information. It also allows you to use the “River of News” model for reading if you want to do so. One thing that I appreciated is that you can tweak a couple of different settings on how it presents feed contents to you. In the view below, I am using a short summary view with a small picture on a roll up page for one of my folders (personal-blogs). This gives me the first few sentences of each item and a picture. If I click on any item, it will expand in place to show me the full feed item. I can click on it again to collapse it or to choose options to save it, etc.

The only problem that I’ve run into so far is that it occasionally loses its synchronization with Google Reader so I see some of the same feeds or it offers me feed items that show as read in Reader if I go to it directly. This has only happened a few times but it is something that the software needs to work on. As a whole, I’ve found it to be a much friendlier way to use Google Reader and I plan to keep using it.

I’m not sure what the business model of the feedly.com site is for this but I expect that the search box at the top of each page may play a role. I haven’t noticed any ads or similar on pages yet. They do have a blog available and seem to be doing regular updates for the overall software.

This is for Firefox 3, only, of course. :-)

Video of Last HOPE Talks Available

The Last HOPE was a hacker convention that took place in New York City in July, 2008. It is one of a series, over the years, sponsored by 2600 magazine. I did not attend because we had just had the Mozilla Summit and I was already scheduled to go to the Black Hat and DEFCON conventions in August. Several of my friends and acquaintances did go though and at least one of them presented there.

The audio of the talks is available on the talks page on the Last HOPE site. You can see descriptions of the talks and listen to lower or higher fidelity versions of the talks. Since many of them have slides or other demonstrations, this is not always the greatest of options. I found out yesterday that torrents have been made available of videos of most of the talks. You can find these here for download. There are no descriptions so you will need to go to the talks page on the main site above if you want information on these talks.

I appreciate that HOPE has made all of these available. The talks from the last few Chaos Communication Congresses are also available for free online as well. This means that those people who don’t have the resources to fly all over to attend these hacker conferences can get some of the value that they offer, which is a nice way of giving back to the community.

Google Chrome is the new black?

Apparently, Google is going to release a web browser based on Webkit sometime in the near future. It is called “Chrome.” While the browser is not available yet, a web comic, drawn by Scott McCloud was accidentally placed online early and then found by people (as an aside, I’ve seen this kind of thing bite a lot of projects in the ass before).

You can see the entire comic at http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/ (if the server has come back up). I’ve also made a version of it available in a .cbz comic book file at http://www.mediafire.com/?sct1crovjdj. CBZ files are simply zip files containing images for use in reading comic books on computers. If you don’t have a computer comic book reader program, you can just unzip the file and look at the numbered images in order in the file.

This page details some of the promised features mentioned in the comic but you can read it for yourself. TechCrunch also has a post on this Google browser as well.

Not having seen this browser yet (no one outside Google has, I would guess), it is hard to give an opinion on it. Generally, as long as things are standards based so we don’t have to write some specialized version of web pages for a browser, I’m in the “the more, the merrier” camp, especially if it turns out to be entirely open source. Since they are using WebKit as the rendering engine for it, I expect that it will render pages as well (or as badly) as Safari does. Once I actually get a chance to play with it, I expect that I will have opinions about the specific Chrome features and whether they live up to their promises. I am kind of surprised that they used a web comic to explain the browser though. Most people would just write a simple web page or something. I’m not sure if this is a cool idea or just kind of a dumb one. Reactions will obviously vary. :-)

Update: Just as I posted this, the Google Blog put up a post on their new browser. They are launching a Windows-only beta for it on September 2 (tomorrow). The comic is now online at Google.