There's no shortage of apps to help aggregate and serve up news and information on important topics. A decade or so ago, this might have been more of a challenge. But today, it’s easily done through a host of services, and even some features baked right into our smartphones.
One of my favorite places to catch up on news and articles related to my interests is Google Discover. It’s only a swipe away from the homescreen on my TCL 20 Pro 5G. Discover gives me all the important stories that are relevant to me.
Discover is amazing. It’s a highly personalized feed of articles based on topics I care about, which Google determines from the sites I’m visiting and the queries I’m searching for. In most cases, my Discover feed is pretty spot on. Plus, I can easily control what I’m seeing just by tapping on the icons that can show me more or less content on any topic.
What I love most about Discover is it’s simplicity:
It’s just a swipe away on my Android phone. No extra app or login is needed.
It’s always up-to-date, surfacing content that’s related to what I’m interested in that week or that same day.
My other source for quick access to news on the go is Twitter. I don’t have time to visit individual publications I’m a fan of, so I subscribe to these outlets’ Twitter feeds to keep a pulse on their latest stories.
Essentially, I’m using Twitter as a modern RSS reader to get the latest posts from the publishers I love.
Relying mostly on these two services have served me well. However, on a recent vacation this summer I experienced something unusual. I had something that I hadn’t experienced in quite a while—downtime.
It was bliss, thanks to limited TV, cutting off work notifications, and having time to catch up on everything that’s important to me.
What I found was that the two primary sources I’ve come to rely on for keeping a pulse on the world around me just didn’t cut it.
Google Discover didn’t provide the volume of content that would help me feel caught up on all the things I’m passionate about. Rather it was really good at providing me with a somewhat limited window into recent info or what I had only recently researched online.
Twitter presented the opposite problem with way too much information. Constant tweets and that firehose of content means it’s never quite able to serve up the stories I want, when I want them. There are simply too many tweets for Twitter to make sense of and deliver in a focused way. It’s fine for killing time while waiting in line at a coffee house, but less useful when you’re dedicating more time to staying informed.
There are great topics and groups I subscribe to on Twitter. The Marketing topic, for example, is great and introduces me to new marketing folks. But the content of the posts have no real consistency, and they’re rarely enriching. Lately, it seems like there’s more marketing inspiration and quotes rather than anything really actionable.
In that moment of disconnectedness on vacation, I turned to an app on my phone I had not touched in many, many years: Feedly. I had used Feedly in the heyday of Feedburner and other tools that helped manage RSS feeds.
What I found was that Feedly was alive and well, and vastly improved. Still powered by the magic of RSS, Feedly was able to keep me up to date with the topics and trends I really cared about, without the limited or overwhelming presentation I found on Google Discover or Twitter, respectively.
Publications can be easily organized into groups. From there, I was able to see all the latest stories from those groupings and individual topics.
Feedly was perfect for my vacation mindset; it was efficient, it was current, it was actually enjoyable. From Marketing news, to Design & UX inspiration, to ideas on the best meals to cook when I got back home, Feedly allowed me to get easily immersed in all the stuff I love.
The information age is great and all, but sometimes there’s just too much information (or disinformation) to track. Feedly was useful in helping me keep a pulse on the topics that I cared about the most when I first used it back in 2008. I’m glad to see that it’s still around and doing exactly what it does best: making it easy to organize, read, and share information.
If you haven’t tried Feedly, I highly recommend giving it a spin.