I’ve been keeping an eye on Feedly since they unveiled their Pro plan earlier this year (I bought a $99 lifetime membership). Their newest additions to the web app are interesting: Popular is an algorithm that detects articles with “engagement” in the Feedly community, and Custom Sharing lets you add your own sharing URL for links.

Here’s how they describe Popular:

Thanks to the engagement and sharing behavior from the community, we are getting a very clear signal of which articles are the most popular within each feed. We added a “Popular” section at the top of each feeds to make sure that you do not miss those articles. If you prefer a chronological view only, this feature can be turned off in the preferences via Preferences > General > Popular.

I just turned on the feature in my account. The first impression is good as it does seem to be recommending articles about popular topics.

Custom Sharing is pretty neat in that it lets you set up a URL to send links to using placeholders for an article’s title and link. I have set up a custom service to bring up the Pinboard add interface, but I’d like to see an option to set up multiple custom sharing services at once (right now, you can only add one, and it doesn’t get a custom icon but a generic envelope one). The feature is reminiscent of Mr. Reader’s custom sharing menu, but for websites, and I think that it is a good addition.

Glenn Fleishman, writing for TidBITS:

Put bluntly, Newsstand is a ghetto. Readers complain to me regularly about forgetting to read The Magazine, even though we use iOS notifications for each issue. If readers don’t read immediately and don’t remember to tap the Newsstand icon later, they forget about us entirely.

His article comes in response to Marko Karppinen, who writes:

The segregation of Newsstand apps into the Newsstand folder wasn’t ever a positive aspect of Newsstand, but we were optimistic and thought that perhaps readers would form new habits around it. As an industry, we decided to give it a go. Apart from some early successes, attributable to a first-mover advantage, that was a mistake.

As users, many of us complained about the old Newsstand’s folder nature and the inability to hide the app, but publishers aren’t so happy now that it’s possible with iOS 7. I’m curious to see if more publishers will chime in on this.

AppleInsider has the photos of what used to be called “FingerLoc”. Look at that old prototype, and think about the fact that now an even better technology sits under your phone’s Home button.