My first time installing a Google Chrome extension was an extremely positive experience, no restarts, quick install, and an awesome plugin called Feedly. Feedly is essentially a feed reader, but it does its job in such an elegant way, that it rises out of all the other readers I’ve seen.

It’s available for Firefox and Chrome as an extension, and will pull your feeds from your Google account. Once installed you can go to the Feedly page to view your feeds, in a very user-friendly, magazine style view. You can view your feeds in a number of ways, my favorite is the cover view, which shows large thumbnails for most recent items on the left, and smaller thumbnails and excerpts for a list on the right. All the views offer great visuals, and good ways to browse, but where Feedly also excels is the reading/sharing/organization options.

Just as on Google Reader, you can share an item or star it using handy, but unobtrusive icons for each item. If you click on an item you get a modal window with the full article. Feedly can generate semantic tags from the article, and you can also use a number of social sharing options (twitter, gmail, delicious, facebook, evernote, and a lot more), regardless of the source article’s origin.

It’s really hard to describe how slick this plugin is, and how seamlessly it works, you really do have to try it out for yourself