Xoopit, Feedly – 2 Products Worthy of Your Love

As social media enthusiasts, we’re always playing with the latest shiny new objects – we’re blogging about them, tweaking them, and putting them through their paces. However, it’s rare that we find new web apps or services that we really fall in love with. When we do – you’ll know. We’ll talk about them so much that it becomes borderline ridiculous. Services like Twitter and FriendFeed for example, have gotten so much coverage in the blogosphere, that those who never drank the Kool-Aid have become decidedly sick of hearing about their awesomeness. However, as of today, I’ve started using two services that I immediately fell in love with. I’m not going to say they’re going to rival the blogosphere insanity that Twitter caused – they’re much too niche for that. But they are pretty amazing.

The services I’m referring to are Feedly and Xoopit. I’m not going to delve in and give thorough and exhausting reviews because they’ve both been reviewed to death, but I’ll give you the highlights.

Feedly

First up is Feedly, this service/Firefox plugin broke onto the scene Monday thanks to Louis Gray. The service is a social start page, but unlike web 1.0 start pages filled with widgets and lolcat pictures, Feedly focuses on leveraging your Google Reader subscriptions to present you the news. There are many different views of your feeds available – a magazine cover which uses your own reading habits to show off the most interesting stories; a what’s new page that combines recent updates with recommended stories from friends; the wall which integrates Twitter and FriendFeed updates as well as other news sources like Netvibes, My Yahoo! or “Best of” streams of news. With Feedly, you can annotate, share, tweet, recommend, email, and search (thanks to built in Google Search) items. But the craziest part is that Feedly is 100% synched up with Google Reader. Read it in Feedly and it’s marked as read in Google Reader. This is downright incredible to me and makes Feedly one of the best web apps I’ve seen in ages.

More on Feedly:

• The Last Podcast: Feedly: Bring Your Feeds Home
• Scribkin: Quick News From Around the Net

Xoopit

Also on my radar is Xoopit, which got covered by just about everyone today. Xoopit is essentially a Gmail search tool. With Xoopit, you can search for files, photos, and videos by means of yes, another Firefox plugin. In a Xoopit sidebar loaded right in your Gmail inbox, you can view all your media hidden deep in your mailbox. Xoopit also offers integration with other services on the social web like Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace, so you can easily share items with others.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with Xoopit – and one I didn’t see mentioned in any of today’s breathless reviews – Xoopit doesn’t currently support Firefox 3. Oops! Didn’t we all just download that yesterday? Yep, sure enough, no FF3. I found this out after downloading the plugin, of course. Script errors galore led me to the help page where I read that devastating news. 

However, they say that they’re working on FF3, and the service is so promising that I’ve subscribed to their blog in anticipation of the day they announce this has been fixed.