Category Archives: Social Media

Earlier today Feedly was rein­tro­duced to the iPad iOS world with sig­ni­fic­ant buzz — Robert Scoble pro­filed the reader (check the video below).

One of the not­able things about Feedly is its HTML 5 base — which allows the major­ity of func­tions to be device agnostic (Android, Win­dows Phone, etc).

But on iOS devices, there are a num­ber of RSS read­ers that have made names for them­selves, and are hap­pily co-existing on my iPad.

All of these read­ers, in some way, tap into your vari­ous social media streams, as well as an exist­ing Google Reader account — which is cool, as you can use the power of Google Reader to man­age the feeds, then simply con­sume the con­tent on your mobile device as is con­veni­ent.
 

Some are my daily use RSS reader, and oth­ers, while inter­est­ing, just haven’t man­aged to keep my atten­tion.
Here’s a few of the ones I like, and why:

 

Zite
Cur­rently my daily use news reader, grabs con­tent from your Twit­ter stream, your Google Reader RSS feeds, and your Deli­cious bookmarks.

Zite gives you a very clean and pol­ished inter­face con­sist­ing of algorithmically-selected stor­ies from your con­tent feeds.

Inter­est­ingly, you can rate and share the con­tent. As you do this, Zite ‘remem­bers’ the con­tent you’ve rated and will get smarter about dis­play­ing con­tent to you as it learns. After a few weeks, you’ll have your own tuned and per­son­al­ized digital magazine made up of the con­tent you like to consume.

The only down­side? The danger of too much ‘same­ness’.  I do occa­sion­ally like to read out­side my reg­u­lar pat­terns, and I fear Zite will not expose me to some new and inter­est­ing things by only show­ing me more of what I like and review. Time will tell.

 

Flip­Board
Ini­tially my reg­u­lar reader, now it’s down to about once a month. Nice dis­play, nice method of read­ing, but not good enough to keep me com­ing back. Zite has replaced Flip­Board as my ‘visual’ reader.

 

Reeder
The 500lb gor­illa of RSS read­ers — quickly and effi­ciently man­ages your con­tent. Dis­plays RSS feeds cleanly and allows you to eas­ily browse your feeds. Simple and eleg­ant design has kept me using this as my reg­u­lar RSS reader when I want to drill down to see what con­tent I’ve missed from a par­tic­u­lar source.

 

Pulse
I have a love / hate rela­tion­ship with Pulse. Nice dis­play. Easy to use and share con­tent. It’s my Num­ber 2 RSS reader…except when it crashes. And it has, usu­ally once a ses­sion when I use it, which is becom­ing less frequent.

 

FLUD
An odd one that has stayed on my device, for the time being.

Sim­ilar to Pulse in lay­out, but not quite as effi­cient in hand­ling feeds, at least from an end-user perspective.

 

Feedly
The new kid on the block. Ties in to Google Reader, has a nifty swipe-sensitive inter­face to flip pages, and a very nice look and feel.

I don’t like the way the con­tent is locked in a ver­tical ori­ent­a­tion (por­trait mode)…and am some­what con­cerned as a blog owner that they’ve blocked out an area for insert­ing advert­ising in my blog con­tent stream — yes they ask you to ping them if that’s your con­tent stream, but what if I don’t — will they insert their own advert­ising on my content?

Regard­less, Feedly is new, and has my atten­tion for now — time will tell, espe­cially as it grows on other mobile platforms.

Your turn — what mobile RSS reader is your daily go-to reader, and why?

Oh, and here’s that Feedly video I promised

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This post of is one of many I pub­lish weekly at the Future Shop Techb­log. Read more of my Life­style Tech­no­logy art­icles here.

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