Orangeinks

Feedly: A Social Start Page for FireFox 3

Feedly is a Firefox Add-on, news/ RSS aggregator, feed reader, social networking site and a browser start page all rolled into a magazine style page. This is a new concept in news reading and sharing them with your friends. The idea basically sums up to reading news and RSS feeds from your favorite blogs and do social networking on the start page of your Firefox browser. It’s like a do it all in one page social networking Firefox add-on. Whew.

You can apply Firefox Live bookmarks, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Netvibes, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Friendfeed to your Feedly. A personalized Google search bar is provided which makes searching your feeds easier. You can save for later, annotate, recommend, email, tweet and preview an article in your feedly account. The annotation tool lets you highlight sections of text, write a side note, and share that particular section with friends or search for related topics.

The wall feature is a place in Feedly where you can see the recommendations and annotations from your friends. And there is a screen saver feature that flashes the Title and Image/video thumbnails (if any) from each article. It’s not very useful but I have to admit that it’s quite cool. Check out the screenshot below.

Feedly is also integrated with Google Reader so any subscriptions you add to Feedly will be added to Google Reader, any article you read or recommend in Feedly will be marked as read and shared in Google Reader and vice versa. There is also a recommendation portion in Feedly where they suggest related articles based on your selected feeds.

Feedly is an entirely unique and interesting way of reading feeds and social networking, maybe even better than iGoogle. To use Feedly, you need to install the Firefox add-on and login to your Gmail account. Give it a try and see how it goes.

Tags: feed reader, feedy, Firefox, news aggregator, RSS, Social Networking, social site

Social Networking – Big Brother Style

Tengaged is a multiplayer social networking game which has similar rules to the popular reality TV show Big Brother. Like they said, “If you know how the BigBrother TV show works, then you’ll understand the game a lot faster.”

For starters, all you have to do is to sign up for a game and once ten people (including you) have signed up, then the game will begin. You get to interact with other nine “housemates” within the game by sending comments or private messages which all of them may be rated positively or negatively by the other contestants. The game runs for seven days and at the end of each day, an algorithm will choose three worst participants and one of them will be voted out by the remaining participants. The final winner will be chosen by the same algorithm.

Tengaged offers an interesting social networking format. Instead of just looking on a profile, adding that profile to your list of friends and hoping that it adds you back, Tengaged makes it mandatory for participants to interact with each other in a socially competitive manner. It’s actually a brilliant marketing idea to get users to visit their site everyday.

Tags: big brother, game, Social Networking, social site, tengaged, tv show