FEEDSPOT! My fountain of information

There's an age old saying out there about there being two kinds of people in the world: People who miss Google Reader, and those who never used it. I'd be in the former camp. Like many people last year, I was in search of a worthy replacement. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING did everything that Google Reader did, but Feedspot Gold comes pretty close (at least for my purposes).

For the un-initiated, I always described it as Tivo for your news. If you get online in the morning and hit CNN, BBC and ESPN etc you're either typing in those addresses, or hitting your bookmarks. Reader/Feedspot took the work out of all that and just monitored those sites for you, meaning you went to ONE place to get all your news. Yahtzee. This also had the further benefit of giving you a single place to be able to go and look back across all the things you'd read. It was also hooked into Gmail nicely, so you could share things etc. So if you have a memory like a sieve like I do, you could always find stuff.




Much of that functionality has been replicated ala making a copy of a copy within the context of Feedspot Gold. I want to make sure that I highlight that there are differences between the free version of Feedspot, and the pay version. Gold gives you hookups to things like LinkedIn so you can easily float stuff out to your network.

It further (and this was key for me) will allow you to generate your own RSS feed from a tag. Let me give you a practical example:

I send stuff to my wife, my friends and my family often. I mean, I'm in feedspot several times a day typically. Rather than having to remember everyone's email addresses, I simply tag them and generate an RSS feed. They could consume information that way if they wanted, but they are more likely to read that information if I email it to them. So have a separate process (which I will detail later) that picks up that RSS item and emails it to the appropriate recipient.

So that is one example, but I have lots of uses for that type of functionality. If you combine that with other services, I can auto-tweet for instance. People who are close to me know that I have 8 twitter accounts (not all of them active). Many are set up to auto tweet based on things I flag and tag here within feedspot.

Further, you can favorite things, and rather than have that locked up in the feedspot app, I have it hooked into GetPocket for archival/long term storage. Then I can reference it later if need be.

What I'm trying to convey (perhaps poorly) is that Feedspot is a hub to consume and distribute information. I could not do what I need to do everyday without it. I keep up with technology, trends, sports teams, industry news even jokes through the lens that is Feedspot. If you're still looking for a Reader replacement, or you're just Reader-Curious, I highly suggest you check it out.

Hit me up if you have questions.

~Brian (a.k.a. the kludgy reviewer)