Heady

No other word for it: Heady. Now let's add three more apps to the growing list of ways to personalize your news and advertising consumption. Your personal newspaper, if you will.

But let's also remember that the key driver here is the new platform: the I-Pad. Yes the experiences of these services are great improvements over the previous generation of personalized newspapers (for the PC platform) such as MyYahoo and IGoogle and Kibooko.com and ICurrent.com -- all of them from the beginning of time, which, of course, was 1993 at the MIT Media Lab and Fishwrap.

But, anyway, let's add Pulse News, Flipboard and FLUD to the lexicon, and the history of the personal newspaper.

And the platforms will keep coming. Long live the king: Personalization.

(You want to see it yourself: http://mashable.com/2010/09/08/ipad-social-news-apps/)

Or read it here:

As news consumption shifts to the personalized social news stream, the platforms we use to consume the news are also changing.

With its media-friendly design, the iPad is the first mobile device to create an environment perfect for real-time news consumption that maintains the sophistication and style of traditional print magazines and newspapers.

Pulse News, Flipboard and FLUD are three apps paving the way for rich, personalized news experiences on the iPad. Each reinvents what it means to read the news by creating a more dynamic, social and visually stimulating way to consume information.

Flipboard and Pulse News are particularly interesting because they both leave it to the user to define the term “news” on their own. They also compel the reader to include their social network friends in the process. Below, we break down all three for a look at how the iPad changes the way we get our news.

1. Pulse News for iPad

Pulse News for iPad transforms the news gathering and reading approach and perfectly appropriates those practices for optimal consumption on the iPad.

The $3.99 application is more than a stylized RSS reader, and includes Twitter and Facebookintegration as well as built-in functionality — powered by Posterous — that lets users create their own My Pulse mini blog and automatically share their favorite stories with friends.

As a news reader, Pulse does not disappoint. Application users can select from featured sources, add their Facebook and Twitter accounts as content sources, connect their Google Reader accounts or add individual RSS feeds or websites. The application supports up to 20 different news sources, each displayed horizontally with photos and text to depict each story. Users who activate My Pulse get an additional five slots for sources.


Stories can be viewed in landscape or portrait mode, text or web format, shared on Twitter or Facebook, and “Pulsed” (added to a user’s My Pulse blog). Users can also flip from one story to the next.

Pulse comes in iPhone and Andriod-friendly versions as well, which makes for a news reading experience that extends beyond the iPad and is almost universally accessible.

Price: $3.99
Notable Features: My Pulse, and Bump technology for instantly discovering friends’ sources.
Lacking: Categories for newspaper-like navigation would be a welcome addition.

2. Flipboard

Flipboard is designed to be a personalized social magazine. It’s equal parts news reader, Twitter application and Facebook client, surfacing the latter two for stories in the form of videos, photos and URLs as shared by the user’s social network friends. As such, it is the most avant-garde when it comes to reinventing the way we consume news.

The very first thing users are greeted with when they launch the app is a stunning photo slideshow. The slideshow is created from photos that are pulled from Flipboard news sources, so once users configure their Twitter and Facebook accounts, the slideshow will also incorporate photos shared by friends on those social networks.

Users can flip the page to edit Flipboard’s contents. This is where the user will go to configure their Facebook and Twitter accounts (multiple accounts are not supported just yet) and add content sources as sections. Sections can be anything from a news outlet or a blog, to a Twitter account or list.


Content sections include the photos, videos and text as shared by friends and pulled from the original source. Each section has a magazine-meets-newspaper feel to it and users can easily breeze through each stylized section by flipping the page.

Flipboard does limit application users to nine sections and does not include support for Google Reader. These limitations are punctuated by the somewhat limitless and Google Reader-friendly options provided by other iPad news readers. Still, Flipboard is not a news reader in the traditional sense, so it should not be approached as such.

Flipboard is free, and as such it’s a must-try application for social media users in search of an alternative way to browse status updates.

Price: Free
Notable Features: Stunning slideshows and incredible Facebook integration (users can “Like” and comment on stories)
Lacking: Extensive source support

3. FLUD

FLUD closely resembles Pulse News in purpose and design. The $3.99 application is built to feature news stories from user-defined sources. The app highlights stories with photos in a magazine-like fashion.

FLUD presents app users with several news sources to get started. Users can click the wrench icon to edit those preferences, select from feature feeds, search for feeds or connect their Google Reader account to select from those feeds.

In landscape mode, stories appear to the right of feeds. In portrait view, stories appear above feeds. The app displays each article in “Text View” to highlight just the text and photos for each story, but users can also tap on “Web View” to view the story as it would appear on the site.


FLUD has one design element that distinguishes it from the competition: Categories. The application distinguishes sources by type, so users can navigate to view just the technology, creative, politics, business, science, lifestyle, entertainment or sports sections individually. By sectioning news based on their sources, FLUD is still able to reinvent the way we consume news while maintaining familiar elements for easy digestion.

Unfortunately, FLUD is lacking in the social media department. Individual articles can be shared and posted to Facebook or Twitter, but users are not able to use either social network as a news source.

Price: $3.99
Notable Feature: Intelligent, auto-defined categories
Lacking: Source support for Facebook and Twitter

BONUS: The Early Edition

The Early Edition iPad app is just a heavily stylized feed reader, and much less social in nature than Flipboard or Pulse News. But, the application’s stellar presentation of feeds is what makes it stand out from the rest.

The Early Edition looks and feels like a newspaper powered by feeds.

Users can keep the plethora of pre-populated feeds as sources, add their own sources or connect their Google Reader account to pull in those feeds. News sources are automatically separated into newspaper-friendly categories like Business, World News, Politics and Food and Wine, but app users can create their own news section should they so choose.


Since the app is structured like a newspaper, users can view article snippets on the front page of each section, flip between pages and select individual stores to view the full text. Individual articles can be viewed in their original web format, and also be sent to Instapaper. The Early Edition works like a typical news reader in the background, marking stories as read and removing them from each “edition” of the paper after each refresh or fetch.

The application does have it quirks. For instance, users can’t easily move feeds between sections or move sections to reorder them. Still, at $4.99, the application creates an enjoyable news reading experience that personalizes the paper and makes your feeds feel more like colorful news stories.

Price: $4.99
Notable Feature: Customizable newspaper-like sections
Lacking: Social media integration

It's already happening

Yes, Google has flip board. And there is CRAYON, and there is twitter.times. I-Google. And Daily Me. And ICurrent.com and Kibboko.com. And there is Tabbloid. Yes, there are numerous sites that take your choices, translate your interests into RSS feeds and present you with a page of stories, some looking newspaper-like and others looking web-like.