Culture

Surf the Web in a new way with Nextly

Flip through Web sites and your Facebook and Twitter feeds with style, grace, and speed with Web app Nextly.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor

Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.

Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms

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Matt Elliott

April 30, 2013 10:45 a.m. PT

2 min read

Odds are you are quite set in your Internet-surfing ways. If you are up for trying out a new way to browse the Web -- or at least some portion of it -- give Nextly a try. It's a free Web service that provides a slick and fast way to access popular sites across a variety of topics.

Nextly lets you browse various Web sites as well as your Twitter and Facebook feeds -- or "streams," in Nextly's parlance. You can quickly jump from one article or post in a stream to the next; Nextly preloads each article or post so that it appears instantly.

Before you can use Nextly, you must first log in with either Facebook or Twitter. After doing so, you're required to then give Nextly an e-mail to sign up for an account.

Once you are in, you'll see a menu bar running across the top of your browser and another menu along the left side. The menu bar at the top shows you which stream you are viewing and the article or post you are currently viewing along with the next item in the stream. You can click the green arrow buttons to move forward and back in the stream or, more easily, you can use your keyboard's arrow keys. The navigation menu on the left provides access to your favorite streams, your bookmarks, and Nextly's other streams.

To add a stream to your favorites, click the small star that sits to the left of the stream's name in the menu bar at the top of the screen. In the middle of this menu bar are Save and Share buttons. Saving an article or post places it in the Bookmarks area in the left-hand menu, while your sharing options feature the usual suspects: Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. There is also an option to open the article in a new tab, which takes you out to the Web site from which it sprang. Lastly, you can click the button in the upper-left corner to hide and unhide the left-hand navigation menu.

Use the Explore Streams section to check out Nextly's streams, which are assembled across 15 categories. The biggest drawback to Nextly is the lack of a direct way to add a Web site as its own stream. Which sites and personalities you follow on Facebook and Twitter give you some say in what shows up in each of those feeds, and you can search for streams and find sources via RSS feeds. CNET, for example, isn't listed in Nextly's Tech category -- but fear not, faithful reader: a search reveals a number of RSS feeds that let you access parts of this, your beloved source for technology news and information.

(Via LifeHacker)