Review: Nextly brings together the best of RSS, social networks, and Web browsing

Nextly Nextly is a refreshing way to browse your favorite feeds and social networks.

Download Now

Google Reader is dead. It changed forever the way we read our news, and it's gone for good, leaving the arena open for other players to attempt the same feats. Nextly, an innovative reading app based on streams, takes regular RSS feeds, strips them of everything that's annoying about the format, and provides a new reading experience that combines RSS with regular website browsing and social-network surfing.

Nextly turns any webpage or feed into a stream you can easily browse through.

To personalize the experience further, sign into Nextly using Facebook or Twitter. This will give you access to the My Collection and Favorites features, but will also enable Nextly's social Web browsing. Let's say you connected Nextly with your Twitter account; you can now use Nextly's stream to browse your Twitter feed and lists, automatically accessing all tweeted links as full articles. In other words, your Twitter (or Facebook) feed will be miraculously transformed into an easy-to-browse stream, complete with reply, retweet, and other sharing options.

This is all great, you might be thinking, but browsing single feeds doesn't sound too exciting in a post-Google-Reader, Feedly-inspired world. This is where Favorites come in. Once signed in, you can add any stream (or website) to your favorites, which then acts as a regular RSS reader for all intents and purposes.

Bookmark any webpage to your collection, or share it using a unique link.

All your favorite websites are listed under the Favorites tab, and while you can't sort these into folders like you can in other readers, Nextly makes up for it with full articles—no "read more" links—and a built-in social browser. Although Nextly displays full webpages in its streams, these are all pre-loaded, so you never have to wait for them to load while you browse.

Nextly also includes a built bookmarking feature called My Collection, to which you can add articles, tag them, and put them aside for later reading. You can also use the My Collection feature to save important articles for quick reference, and browse it at any time just like any other Nextly stream.

With Nextly, your Twitter feed turns into an RSS feed, with full webpages for each link.

Nextly is still in beta, but you won't notice this most of the time. The only bug I encountered, and this too was rare, was Web elements that failed to load correctly, mostly special ones like an iOS 7 live demo I was trying to check out. There's also no way that I could find to add streams manually if you can't find them in the Explore tab or by using the nextly.com/websitename method. While I was able to browse the vast majority of websites I tried using one of these two methods, I could not browse the ones I failed to find. With that said, if you're tired of truncated RSS feeds and traditional RSS readers, Nextly is sure to brighten your day.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use this Web-based software.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

10 Weirdest Social Networks

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Seesmic Desktop Manages More Social Networks Than You Knew Existed

If you're a social networker who's really, really social, you'll appreciate Seesmic Desktop 2. This social media manager offers support for more than 90 services, including everything from the basics like Facebook and Twitter to lesser-known offerings like Yammer and Stocktwits.

You can add more third-party services via Seesmic's Marketplace, an approach that keeps the application nicely uncluttered.Seesmic Desktop 2 is one of Seesmic's social apps; the other is Seesmic Web, a cloud-based offering that can sync with the desktop counterpart. Seesmic also offers a host of mobile apps, including versions of Seesmic for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, and a separate mobile app called Ping, which focuses on allowing you to post status updates to multiple services.

Seesmic Desktop 2 offers that feature, of course, as well as many others. When you download the application, it features integrated support for Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, Salesforce Chatter, Twitter, and--curiously enough--the now-defunct Google Buzz. Connecting accounts is a seamless process, unless you try to connect a Google Buzz account, which will result in an error page. To gain access to the 90 or so additional services that Seesmic supports, you'll have to add them via the app's integrated marketplace. Doing so is easy, and this approach nicely prevents these lesser-used services from cluttering up Seesmic's interface.

And that interface is nicely streamlined. Seesmic features the column-style interface favored my many of its competitors, like TweetDeck. It lacks the customization of an application like Sobees Desktop, which lets you rearrange columns and panels to your heart's delight: Seesmic (like TweetDeck, too) keeps everything in columns, albeit columns that you can rearrange to your liking. If you want your Facebook news feed to appear in the first column, you simply drag it to that location. Want to see your Twitter @replies in the next column? Drag them there. The columns stay in the order you set them in, which is a nice change from apps that only allow you to make such changes by accessing a settings menu.

Seesmic Desktop lets you update your status across multiple services at once, and lets you schedule posts for the future. To do so, though, you need to be signed into your Seesmic account, which you can create for free online. Unfortunately, when you see the notification that you must be signed in, the application doesn't automatically take you to the form where you can do so: Instead, you're left to find that option on your own. Without a helpful pointer from the folks at Seesmic, this seemingly simple process would have taken much longer than it should.

Overall, Seesmic Desktop is a slick-looking application that offers plenty of powerful features. It will appeal to folks who manage lots (and lots) of social media accounts across multiple services. Folks who are simply looking for a way to keep on top of Facebook and Twitter accounts might be overwhelmed with Seesmic's many options, though.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

-- Liane Cassavoy

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here