Thumbing through the newspaper over your morning coffee and a few minutes of chitchat at the water cooler used to be all it took to stay up-to-date on your world. Now we're faced with a constant flow of information from the internet that often feels overwhelming. The crop of iOS apps dedicated to bringing you a curated, customizable, and attractive stream of content is one way to combat the information overload. Much more than simple RSS readers, these digital digest apps cull stories from across the web and your social networks and wrap them into an iPad friendly and design-forward package. Here's a look at the best options.
(If you just want to hear which we liked best, go ahead and jump down to the end.)
Flipboard (iTunes) is the most well-known of the digital digests, and it was considered one of the iPad's first killer apps. Flipboard pioneered the mixing of social networks and news outlets using a slick visual design; it was even named on of the The 50 Best Inventions of 2010 by Time Magazine.
Flipboard has a great user-interface and visual design. It turns your iPad into a gorgeous glossy magazine filled with pictures of your friend's babies and professional photojournalists' best work. Images fill the iPad's screen and the type is crisp and clean. This eye-candy appeal makes the app a real virtual-page turner that will have you saying "just one more flip" until way past your bedtime.
If the strength of the Flipboard's visuals are its biggest draw, it's the way the app merges your social feeds into the stream of traditional content that keeps you coming back. Flipboard's presentation of tweets as pull-quotes scattered among the headlines and images of the stories linked to by your contacts is a welcome improvement on Twitter's linear stream.
Flipboard focuses on your social networks when building your digital digest, but it also allows you to add in sections of traditional web content feeds. These feeds are generated through Twitter streams, and as a result you are often presented with only the first paragraph of a story and have to click-through to the source site to complete the reading. The sudden change from Flipbord's clean design to the uneven quality of the outgoing link is often jarring.
Besides causing the uneven presentation, the source of a story also limits the way you are able to share that story; if you want to share a story from Twitter you can only tweet about it. Likewise with Facebook stories; there is no simple way of tweeting a link that originated in Facebook.
Flipboard was the first digital digest on the scene and it is one of the most visually appealing UIs on the iPad. The app engages you with your social networks in a new and very enjoyable way, and it deserves a spot on everyone's iPad. However, the limits to sharing the content feel awkward and dated and the limited sources for outside content focus Flipboard more on your social networks and less on news stories.
Like Flipboard, Zite (iTunes) merges your Twitter feed with curated web content, and it allows you to add in your Google Reader feeds for more material. The app's hook is that it learns your reading habits using algorithms developed by the University of British Columbia's Laboratory for Computational Intelligence and suggests articles that you will like . Zite monitors which articles you read and how long you spend on each type of article so the learning process is more transparent than using manual thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons (though those are available).
Zite's presentation is a midpoint between Flipboard's design-nerd look and Google Reader's utilitarian layout, and the app is intuitive and beautiful. There is rarely the confusion of UI elements that the other digital digest apps can exhibit. Once you've added content categories flipping through the stories feels natural.
Zite's user interface is second only to the AI-driven recommendations as the app's best feature. Whatever voodoo is going on behind the scenes is impressive, and after just a day or two of using the app you will be presented with compelling articles that you didn't know you wanted to read. A simple customization panel slides out from the right side and allows you to further tune the app's selections.
Once Zite has shown you some great blog-post or news story there are numerous ways to share the story. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are represented, as well as popular web services like Instapaper, Read It Later, Evernote, and Delicious.
One glaring omission from Zite's stable of sources is Facebook, and it doesn't showcase the tweets of your Twitter connections the way that Flipboard does. This makes the app more of a news-aggregater and less of a way to interact with your social networks. Zite was acquired by CNN earlier this year, and while they news network hasn't made any changes to the app some think this loss of Independence will hurt Zite down the road.
If you want to see all your friends tweets and Facebook updates in your digital digest, Zite is not be the best choice. The great recommendation algorithm makes ii the best at providing you with always interesting content, and there are numerous ways to share this content. Zite is my most used app on the iPad, and it is the first thing I open when I have a little time to kill on the couch.
Editions (iTunes), AOL's entry into the digital digest space, takes the virtual news magazine concept a step further with its presentation and by making it possible to read the app "cover to cover." Editions only updates its content once per day; once you select which topics you would like the app downloads all the articles chosen by its algorithms, indexes them, and makes them available for off-line reading. When you have completed the 100-or-so pages of the edition you are done until the next day (or you manually refresh).
Edition's strongest feature is the off-line reading capabilities, and for someone who is often without a data connection but still wants to have tailored content available throughout the day, like subway commuters, it is perfect. You can customize the app's color pallet and create a black-list for sources you don't want Editions to pull from.
The sharing options in Editions are better than Flipboard, and while not as comprehensive as Zite's options all the major services are covered. The app also has some fun extras like a weather report on the cover and a horoscope feature at the "end" of each edition.
Editions' user interface feels a little like Jekyll and Hyde. Visually the app is close to Zite and Flipboard's design, but the UI feels sluggish and often stutters and flickers when navigating. Articles you select are opened as a web page in the app's internal browser, and you get a jolt when the app transitions from the clean design of its pages to the often cluttered design of the source's web page (complete with ads).
The sluggishness and uneven presentation can be jarring, but more jarring is the app's large and interactive ads. It is too easy to trigger an advertisement while trying to navigate past it, and this can result in videos or 3D animations playing. When you consider all the ads you also see while reading the content, Editions is easily the most ad-dense of the digital digests.
The developers did a commendable job of making the app feel like you are reading a digital magazine. This makes the slowness of the UI and the frequency of advertisements breaking up the reading experience more glaring than they might otherwise be. The variety of ways to share articles and the offline reading feature can make up for a lot of the app's shortcomings, and it is worth trying out if you have a Wi-Fi iPad and spend time reading without a Wi-Fi network.
Livestand (iTunes) is Yahoo's horse in the digital digest race, and like AOL Editions it uses a network of content providers to populate your reading list. While it lacks the quantity of sources that the other options offer, Livestand has an attractive presentation and lots of options to tailor the available content just the way you want it.
Livestand presents articles in a simple way that is not jarring or distracting, and it is the most visually consistent of the digital digest apps. Instead being unsure if you will see the story you select reformatted or if you'll be taken to the source's web page, Livestand always smoothly transitions to an attractively formatted article that matches the style of the app. This seems like a small thing, but it makes the whole reading experience feel more natural and seamless.
Livestand doesn't have a single fault that makes it hard to recommend, but a combination of smaller issues make it feel unpolished. Though the app has over 100 content partners, its selection of sources doesn't have the breadth of Zite or Flipboard, and Livestand feels much more limited in the viewpoints it presents. The app's performance isn't as choppy and distracting as Editions, but it also doesn't have the snap of Flipboard. Sharing articles is limited to email and Facebook, and you must use a landscape orientation when using the app where the competing apps are more flexible.
While there were no terrible problems with Livestand, there were enough little issues that the app seems cumbersome and unfinished. The article layouts look great, even better than Flipboard in a lot of cases, but the limited content and poor sharing options put it at the bottom of the list. The app was only released in November, and with some updates the app could be a serious contender.
The new kid on the block, Currents (iTunes), is Google's long awaited Digital Digest app, and it launched with a deep catalog of content providers and some nice features. Currents links to your Google account and is available across iOS and Android devices.
The feature that separates Currents from the pack is a well organized Trending Topics section with video support. Trending Topics is broken up into tabs; the "Stories" tab is a scrolling feed of popular topics in eight different categories. Once you select a topic you are shown all the sources reporting on that topic, and this is a nice way to get some different perspectives on one story. The "User Generated" tab has pages of YouTube videos related to the topic to flip through. Currents is the only digital digest to include video content and it is such a natural feature for tablet computers that I am surprised it is not more common in the digital digets.
Currents also allows you to read content offline. Read items are synced to your Google account; a nice touch if you do your reading on multiple devices.
The attractive user interface has some rough edges, and it feels clunky to use. Often images for a topic appear overly-enlarged and pixelated, and the mass of images that appear on top of topic pages are a chaotic jumble. Sometimes you navigate with up-and-down scrolling and other times with left-and-right scrolling, and this causes a low-level confusion that persists while you flip through the app.
There are plenty of ways to share content you find, but oddly Google+ posting is missing. You can +1 a story, but there is no way to share it with your circles from the iOS app. I also ran into some bugs when sharing articles with some sources where the actual link would not appear in the email or tweet.
The relevancy of Currents' recommendations and user generated content is often way off base; a lot of topics will recommend other stories that are only tangentially related at best. The accuracy of these recommendations should improve as the app matures, but right now they can be more distracting that useful.
Google's addition of video and the leveraging of their search and aggregation technology set Currents apart from the crowd. The app is just a few days old however, and there are some improvements and fixes that need to be made before it is a real challenger to Flipboard's attractive interface and Zite's content delivery and sharing.
Predictably, the choice boils down to your personal preference, and what you are looking to get out of this style of app. Flipboard is the best alternative way to stay up to date on your Twitter and Facebook feeds, but it's limited sharing options and smaller pool of content sources mean it isn't the best choice if you want to read more articles than tweets.
The app I choose to give precious iPad dock space too is Zite. It is currently the best bet if you want a practically endless stream of articles delivered to you plus the best tools to share content with your friends. Add in the ability to specify RSS feeds to add to your digest and Zite's uncanny learning abilities and the app is easy to recommend to any iPad user.
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