Extension Watch: FeedSquares for Google Chrome

Productivity Sauce

Google Reader is a mighty good feed aggregator with a boatload of useful features, but its traditional two-pane interface has some room for improvement. And the FeedSquares extension for the Google Chrome browser represents a bold attempt to rethink the way you read and manage RSS feeds. The basic idea is pretty simple: the extension displays all feeds from your Google Reader account as colored tiles on a wall. Each tile (or square) shows the name of the RSS feed and an unread count.

Click on the square, and all articles in the feed pop up at the bottom of the window. Click on the article you like, and it opens in a preview window. You can then read the article's excerpt as well as share it using Google Reader's sharing features. FeedSquares can also handle feed categories, and it does it in a rather clever way: click on the desired category link at the top, and all feeds in the selected category become highlighted. As you would expect, FeedSquares stays in sync with Google Reader, and the extension automatically refreshes feeds in the background at specified intervals.

FeedSquares is also available as a standalone application for the Android platform. So if you are using an Android device and you fancy the way FeedSquares manages RSS feeds, you can grab the application from the Android Market.

Although FeedSquares' interface may look a bit gimmicky, it works surprisingly well. So if you are looking for an alternative way to read RSS feeds, you might want to give FeedSquares a try.