What feeds them? Tina Roth Eisenberg (aka Swissmiss), blogger and designer.

Swissmiss

Who are you and what is your blog about?

My name is Tina Roth Eisenberg but most people call me Swissmiss, which is the name of my design blog and my Twitter handle. My blog started out of the desire of wanting to create a personal visual archive of all the inspiring and helpful things I would find on my daily internet adventures. This was in 2005, in the days before Tumblr and Pinterest, where visual blogging wasn’t established yet. On my site you can find anything from beautifully designed furniture, to art, to kids toys, to quotes that inspire or videos that made me laugh. If I find something particularly beautiful, practical or inspiring, chances are I want to share it with my readers.

But my blog is just a small portion of what I do. After arriving in NYC in 1999 I worked in various prominent design firms to then start my own graphic design studio in 2006. In 2010 I decided to take a client sabbatical to focus on my various (fulfilling) side projects. This hiatus has since been extended indefinitely and I now run four businesses out of DUMBO, Brooklyn. With the help of my amazing team, I run a collaborative workspace called Studiomates, organize a global, monthly lecture series called CreativeMornings, I am the inventor of the to-do app TeuxDeux and just recently changed the world of temporary tattoos with my latest project Tattly.

What do you use feedly for?

I follow a rather large (unhealthy?) amount of websites. Feedly helps me feel organized and save time when sifting through hundreds and hundreds of posts every day. Feedly makes this process not only effective but also a true visual pleasure. I am a web designer by trade, with a minimal Swiss aesthetic, and I can wholeheartedly say that no other service comes close to Feedly’s high visual standards. I especially love to use the Cards view on my desktop to see what peeks my interest, and I ‘save’ the ones that I plan to then share on my blog.

Do you have any tips you would like to share with the feedly community?

If you add too many sites to your feedly you can get really quickly overwhelmed. The solution I found is that I try to a) organize my feeds meticulously and b) delete a feed if it is lacking in quality posts. Also, I created a category called “Testrun” where I organize feeds I just discovered. After having read them for a couple of days I decide if I should remove them or if I should add them to one of my main feedly categories.

What are your 5 favorite feeds?

Brain Pickings — Subscribe
Organized Wonder — Subscribe
Michael Galpert — Subscribe
iGNANT — Subscribe
But does it float — Subscribe

If you too want to share to the feedly community how you feed your mind please reach out to Arthur at arthur@feedly.com

feedly mobile 14.1 is out: New Title-only View

Thank you to Apple for approving feedly for iOS 14.1. This release focuses on a better list view and fixing a few critical bugs around authentication and loading. It is a step forward towards making feedly a better home for Google Reader users looking for a new reader.

Feedly for 14.1 is available now in the app store and continues to be free:
Get feedly 14.1 for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch
Get feedly 14.1 for Android

New title view

Here is the detailed change log:
☂ Users do not need to login over and over again.
★ Denser and cleaner title-only view.
★ Brought back the old list view.
★ Better support for Hebrew and Farsi.
☂ Titles are no longer cut off in the title only view on iPhone 4
☂ Better support for flaky network connections.
☂ Lots of small bug fixes.

14.0.477 – An update of feedly desktop focused on performance and quality

Our current focus is quality and keeping the service up. We are pushing out today a new release of feedly for Chrome/Safari/Firefox which addresses some of the most pressing issues reported by the community.

Download the latest version

feedly for Firefox (requires manual update)
feedly for Safari (requires manual update)
feedly for Chrome (auto-updates)

Screen Shot 2013-04-08 at 2.48.13 AM

Change Log

Issue #1: “Re-login”. The session management has been improved so that users do not have to continuously re-login, even when the server is under very high load.

Issue #2: Full width. To make reading in title only mode more efficient, we now stretch the content of the list to take advantage of the full width of the window.

Issue #3: Support for Hebrew and Farsi. Feedly knows now how to render right to left languages like Hebrew, Farsi and Arabic.

Issue #4: Faster load time. We optimized some of the client code to make loading feedly faster. We are also adding hardware as fast as we can.

Issue #5: Support for folders including [ ]. The previous version was not able to load categories with brackets in their name. This issue has been fixed.

Issue #6: Better feed search. It should be easier now to find a feed by URL and add it to your feedly.

Issue #7: More sharing options in the title only view. We added shortcuts in the list view to easily share articles to twitter, Facebook, linked in and Buffer.

Screen Shot 2013-04-08 at 2.49.02 AM

Announcing the New Feedly Mobile

Today, we are very excited to announce a brand new version of Feedly Mobile, centered around search and discovery, productive reading and better sharing.

It is available now on:
iPhone
iPad
iPod touch
Android Phone
Android Tablet
Firefox
Chrome
Safari

We’ve had two crazy, wonderful weeks at Feedly. Over 3 million new users have joined Feedly since the announcement of the retirement of Google Reader. We are thankful that so many Reader refugees have chosen Feedly for their new home, and are adding hardware as quickly as we can to make that transition as seamless as possible.

feedy

All-new search and discovery engine

Introducing a completely new way to search and discover feeds. Our new feed search engine is amazingly fast, and brings over 50 million feeds to your fingertips. No other news reader comes even close to offering this breadth of choice.

The smart topic completion feature enables a truly intuitive search and discovery experience. The new search algorithm leverages millions of interactions from the Feedly community, helping you find the best feeds on the web. There are already millions of people using Feedly, and more and more joining every day. The more you use Feedly to search, categorize and follow your favorite feeds, the better our search and discovery will become.

Feedly New Search

Productive reading

To make sure you never miss updates from your most important feeds, we have added a feature called “Must Reads”. New posts from the feeds that you promote as “must read”, will bubble up to the top of the feed selection panel and in the “Today” section.

We have also added a pull to refresh gesture to the feed selection panel so that you can always easily get to the latest content available.

Finally, we added a new title only view to make scanning of headlines more efficient.

Productive Reading

Fast and easy sharing

The redesigned sharing panel makes sharing and saving articles to read later, easier than ever. We have added support for Google+, and settings that let you select which saving and sharing option should have a shortcut on your main toolbar. Google+, Pocket and Buffer users will appreciate the direct access to their favorite tools.

Sharing

We would like to thank all the users who have provided invaluable feedback through the UserVoice support forum. We would also like to thank the 500+ people who have participated in the Android private beta over the last 10 weeks. Their feedback and bug reports were key in helping us to get to the release finish line. Last but not least, we would like to thank Anthony Casalena, Founder and CEO of Squarespace, for providing us with such great insight over the last three months on how to make Feedly a better reader. His feedback was the inspiration for a lot of the productivity features we are delivering in this update.

The feedback we collected during the private beta was the best we have received since the first release of Feedly Mobile and we can’t wait to see how this update resonates with the rest of the community.

Please let us know what you think!

All the best,

Your Feedly Team

10 new features for a smoother transition

We just released a new update of feedly for Chrome, Firefox and Safari with 10 new features. If you are using feedly on Firefox and Safari, please do a manual upgrade.

Change summary

★ Firefox upgrade from old v10 codebase to latest v14 codebase.
★ A new left selector design. Less loud – more more all caps.
★ Better read/unread contrast
★ Sort alphabetically
★ Denser, cleaner list view
★ n/p keyboard shortcuts.
★ Fast view switching
★ Faster saving.
★ Better LinkedIn integration.
★ Better recommendations.
☂ Memory optimization

Install the latest version now:

Feedly for Firefox
Feedly for Chrome
Feedly for Safari
Feedly mobile

Detailed information

Feature #1. Upgrading feedly firefox from the old v10 code base to the latest v14 codebase. Firefox users will be able to benefit from a lot of the enhancements we implemented over the last 12 months on Chrome. Going forward, we are going to release Firefox, Chrome and Safari all at the same time.

Feature #2. A new left selector design. Less loud – no more all caps. Better contrast between read and unread. New selector Feature #3. Sort alphabetically. More control over how feeds and categories are sorted on the left selector. Either drag and drop and easily re-sort alphabetically.

Feature #4. fast view switching. One of the key features of feedly is that you can easily adapt the format/layout of your feeds to different workflows. We bubbled up that feature in the UI to make easy to try different views and see which one is right for you.

Feature #5. faster saving. We improved the experience for users whose workflow is to quickly scan list views and save for later (aka star in Google Reader).

Feature #6. Denser, cleaner list view. Making the transition from the Google Reader list view to the feedly list view as seamless as possible. New list view Feature #7. n/p keyboard shortcuts. We improved support for the n(ext)/p(revious) keyboard shortcuts. Type ? in feedly to see the list of other keyboard shortcuts we support.

Feature #8. Better recommendations. We improved the feedly curation algorithm used to select the articles which are featured at the top of each page.

Feature #9. better LinkedIn integration. Special thanks to the buffer team for sprinting with us to make the feedly LinkedIn integration as seamless as possible.

LinkedIn

Feature #10. Memory optimization. No more memory leaks. No more refreshes while you are reading articles.

Thanks again for all the feedback. Please continue to be vocal and help us spread the word.

Millions of Bees

MG Siegler wrote an interesting article about the Google Reader crowd and why they are important to the web ecosystem.

“Reader’s users, while again, relatively small in number, are hugely influential in the spread of news around the web. In a sense, Reader is the flower that allows the news bees to pollinate the social web. You know all those links you click on and re-share on Twitter and Facebook? They have to first be found somewhere, by someone.”

These “bees” are curious and creative people who are selective about what and when they want to consume their information. They are designers, writers, teachers, researchers, developers, moms, students busily feeding their minds, connecting dots and sparking new conversations.

Screen Shot 2013-03-25 at 10.41.43 AM

We feel thankful that a lot of these influential bees are selecting feedly as their new flower. We believe that they are special and will be core to the feedly community going forward.

We are doing our best to add hardware, listen, release updates and make sure that their transition is as seamless as possible.

If you are a bee looking for a new flower, try feedly today and help us spread the word. Hashtag: #feedlybees

An awesome skin: list view with full width support

Amazed by people’s creativity. Thank you Lockal. Here is a user script to make feedly more useful for people who need a list view with full width.

Screen Shot 2013-03-22 at 11.15.31 AM

You can get this userscripts from:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/162237

What it does:

  • Makes layout a little more compact, less free space
  • Full width of screen to display more content
  • NO MORE YELLING AT YOU CAPITALIZED TEXT EVERYWHERE
  • Grey colour title for read article when it is opened
  • Mark categories with unread articles with bold
  • Favicons are always shown
  • Some visual fixes (e. g. misplaced images and youtube videos in RSS feeds)
  • Arial Font to make webpages more responsive
  • “shift+a” marks all as read

Note:
On Feedly need to use the ‘Modern Gray’ Theme and ‘Titles’ View.

Feedly for Safari Update – 14.0.468

About 25% of the people who have been trying feedly over the last week have been Safari users. So we decided to do a sprint and improve the speed and experience.

Screen Shot 2013-03-21 at 10.51.08 PM

You can install the latest version of feedly for Safari from:
Feedly for Safari

Please leave a comment if you have trouble installing the extension or run into issues.

Note: Firefox is next.

Better Title View

We just pushed out version 14.0.469 of feedly for Chrome. The key feature of this update is a better title view: more compact, better shorting and easier to scan. Here is what it looks like:

Better Title View

We would like to thank Christopher Seeds for his suggestions and mock-ups.

If you are a Firefox or Safari user, we hope to have these updates and more available for you at the end of next weeks.

As promised, we are going to continue to iterate fast so if you have suggestions, please post them to your user voice forum.

Spike problem resolved.

Sorry for the performance issue we ran into this morning. The problem has been resolved. We are monitoring the servers and increasing capacity to be ahead of the next spike. Welcome to all of the feedly+Android users! We have a good news for you: new feedly 14 beta later this week.

feedly #1

Posted in All

Priorities: Keeping the site up, listening and adding new features.

More than 500,000 Google Reader users have joined the feedly community over the last 48 hours. We love passionate readers. Welcome on board.

Our main priorities over the next 30 days are 1) to keep the service up, 2) listen to new users for suggestions and 3) add features weekly.

To keep the service up, we 10x our bandwidth and added new servers.

For new features, we are listening actively to our new uservoice forum and will be pushing out new releases on a weekly basis. Be vocal: we love candid feedback.

Note 1: Here are some tips on how to make feedly less pretty and more functional.

Note 2: If you are a Google Reader, give feedly a try before July 1st, and you will be able to migrate seamlesly:
Feedly for iOS
Feedly for Android
Feedly for Chrome
Feedly for Firefox
Feedly for Safari

Note 3: thanks for making feedly the #1 application on the Apple Store!

Screen Shot 2013-03-14 at 10.25.51 AM

Tips for Google Reader users migrating to feedly

October 2017 update: We have come a long way since March 2013. Personalization has emerged as one of the defining traits that our community loves about Feedly. So we have published a new tutorial to showcase our recommendations for personalizing your Feedly experience. Some of the terminology and screenshots below have changed since this post was published. Thank you for reading!

Welcome to all the new Google Reader users migrating to Feedly. Below you’ll find some tips on how to adapt to the Feedly desktop interface.

If you are not running Feedly, you can install the latest version free:
Feedly for Firefox
Feedly for Chrome
Feedly for Safari

Related: How to get the most out of your feedly on the desktop (CNET)
Translations: Chinese

Tip #0: Importing your Google Reader account

To import your Google Reader feeds and categories over to Feedly, simply login to your feedly using your google account. Feedly will automatically sync your Google Reader account with feedly.

Tip #1: A more condensed view

A lot of Google Reader users use their reader as a research/curation tool and need to be able to crunch through a lot of articles very fast. When you are in a feed or category page, you can click on the gear icon and select the Titles view to get a denser text only experience. If you want assign the titles view to all your feeds and categories, there is a global knob in the preference page.

More compact

Tip #2: Starring Articles

When you hover on an article or inline it, you should see a bookmark icon. We call it the save for later icon. It functions similarly to the Google Reader star mechanism.

Screen Shot 2013-03-13 at 11.50.08 PM

Tip #3: A more visual experience

Some of our users are designers using Feedly to keep up with trends in their industries. If the content of the sources you follow are very visual, we offer a Cards view which allow you to skim the content through a more visual experience.
Screen Shot 2013-03-13 at 11.46.29 PM

Tip #4 Preference Knobs

At the bottom of the left selector, you will find a link to the feedly preferences. We offer a variety of knobs: auto-mark as read, link colors, default view, etc..

Screen Shot 2013-03-13 at 11.48.17 PM

Tip #5 Tagging

Like Google Reader, Feedly includes the concept of tagging. You configure your list of tags in the preference or create them one by one as you go.
Screen Shot 2013-03-13 at 11.49.22 PM

Then as you open and read an article, you will see a +Tag option pre-configured with all your tags. We are working very hard to integrate the feedly tagging with both Evernote and Pinterest so that you can quickly organize and share your best finds.Screen Shot 2013-03-13 at 11.49.37 PM

This is a live document. If you just migrated from Google Reader and have questions regarding how to adapt your existing workflow to the feedly interface, please leave a comment and we will be happy to try to help. We will update document as we get tips and questions.

Tip #6 Keyboard Shortcuts

Press ? to see the list of the keyboard shortcuts supported by Feedly

Screen Shot 2013-03-13 at 11.47.11 PM

Tip #7: Pick your theme

At the bottom of the left selector, there is switch theme option. The white theme will make feedly feel more like the Google Reader environment.

Screen Shot 2013-03-18 at 4.49.22 PM

Did you recently switch from Google Reader to Feedly? What are your tips?

Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly

Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting for some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.

If you are a Google Reader, give feedly a try before July 1st, and you will be able to migrate seamlesly:
Feedly for iOS
Feedly for Android
Feedly for Firefox
Feedly for Chrome
Feedly for Safari

Note 1: if you are migrating from Google Reader to feedly, here are some tips on how to personalize feedly to better match your existing workflows. If you have any feature request please add it on our feature request page.

Note 2: if you are a third party developer using the Google Reader API and would like to integrate with Normandy, please send an email to remi@feedly.com. We would love to keep the Google Reader ecosystem alive.

Update 22:24 PST: Bandwidth upgraded. New servers added. Welcome to all the new users.

All Boats Leak

There’s always a defect, always a slow drip, somewhere. Every plan, every organization, every venture has a glitch.

The question isn’t, “is this perfect?” The question is, “will this get me there?”

Sometimes we make the mistake of ignoring the big leaks, the ones that threaten our journey.

More often, though, we’re so busy fixing tiny leaks that we get distracted from the real goal, which is to go somewhere.

-Seth Godin

Finding the right balance is really hard. This is one of the reasons it is important to have in the founding team of a startup someone who is focused on the product (ie fixing the leaks) and someone who is focused on the market (ie going somewhere). -Edwin

[Completed] Scheduled Downtime

images

Hello feedlies! A quick heads up: We need to take the service offline tomorrow, Saturday Feb 23rd between 6:00pm PST and 10:00pm PST to make some changes to our database – to improve the performance going forward. If you need urgent access to your feedly during that time, you can use the Google Reader interface. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Live Updates

[18:44 PST] The scheduled maintenance started. We should be back online within 2 hours. Thank you for your patience. We will update this post as the status evolves.

[18:57 PST] Maintenance complete. The service should be back online. Have a great week end.

Feedly for Chrome 14.0.466 is out

We just pushed out a new version of feedly for chrome. It impacts both the feedly and the feedly plus flavors.

Here is a quick overview of the change log:

Change #1: We fixed a series of session related bugs. As a result, you should start seeing fewer offline messages.

Change #2: We renamed Today. The new name is Highlights. This is to re-enforce that that section is a subset of the articles published on your feedly. The content has not changed yet, but it will. Arthur is doing some usability research to understand how people use that section and how we can simplify it while making it more useful. More soon.

Change #3: We renamed Latest. The new name is All. This is part of a bigger goal of better supporting people who read everything in their feedly and for whom All, unread counts, marking things as read and saving things for later is very important. Here again, Arthur is doing some UX research which will help us streamline some of the workflows power readers have put in place.

Our focus for the first part of this year is to improve the quality and performance of feedly across the board. This is a first step towards that direction. Please let us know if you have questions/suggestions.

Turbulence – Feb 17th, Feb 18th and Feb 19th.

Turbulence

We are in the process of upgrading some of our back end services to be able to handle more users faster. There will be some turbulence in the service over the next couple of days.

Between now and then, here are some work arounds:

1) If you have trouble logging into Feedly/Google Reader, please visit Google Reader and see if the authentication requires a captcha, if so login first to Google Reader and then go back and login to feedly.

2) If you have trouble loading feedly, please wait a few minutes and try to restart your browser or the iOS and Android app.

The service should feel a lot faster and more reliable by the end of this week. Thank you for your patience.

Smarter Sharing: Feedly connects with Buffer

It all started in summer of last year. We started to see an increasing number of users asking us to integrate buffer’s sharing features into feedly.

At first, we did not understand why: we already had good integration with twitter and facebook. With hindsight, it is obvious: feedly users tend to read their feedly once or twice  a day and love to share the best articles they find with their social networks to generate engagement and cultivate their digital persona. For users sharing a lot, the bursts end up overwhelming their followers.

In November 2012, we met with the buffer team and were seduced by their level of energy and their obsession with customer happiness. Enough that we decided to do a sprint and build a small prototype of what a feedly+buffer experience might look like.

Sharing an article using buffer
Sharing an article on both Twitter and LinkedIn using Feedly+Buffer

After a couple of days of usage, I was in love!

My buffer is configured with my Twitter account, my facebook account and my LinkedIn account. The configuration lives in the buffer cloud, allowing me to access my accounts from lots of different apps and lots of different devices.

In the mornings, when I read through my favorites sources in feedly, I can easily share the best articles to both Twitter and LinkedIn (I consider those two networks as isomorphic. They are both related to my passions and professional life and sharing content allows me to spark interesting conversations and build up karma).

I have scheduled buffer to deliver articles to Twitter and LinkedIn every hour. So even though I am reading and sharing all my articles at around 5:45am in the morning, they get spread through the day, resulting in much better engagement.

My buffer delivery schedule
My buffer delivery schedule

In December, we decided to take a couple of weeks and productize the prototype on both iOS and Chrome.

Working with the buffer team was awesome: I have rarely seen people with such a positive attitude and so focused on doing the right thing for the customer.

What we are announcing today, is the first step towards a long partnership: we have lots of great plans regarding adding more sharing options and making sharing more visual and impactful.

If you are curious on how to get started, here is a quick tutorial:

  1. Go to www.bufferapp.com, create a free account and connect it with your social networks.
  2. Go to iTunes and make sure that you have the latest version of feedly for iOS.
  3. When you want to share an article on feedly for iOS (or feedly for Chrome), simply tap on the buffer icon, login, select the subset of networks you want to share with and that is it.
  4. Over time, try to think about what would be the ideal delivery schedule for your workflow and your audience. You might need to upgrade to the buffer awesome plan to get more flexibility. I did.

Go ahead. Give it a try. You won’t go back!

See Buffer’s post about the partnership.

Special thanks to Leo and Cyril for driving this project. Thanks to TNWAppAdvice, The Social Media Hat, Lifehack and MacLife for helping us spread the news.

Edwin // feedly co-founder and CEO