The iPad and the Budding News Junkie

It's also amazing how a different method of delivery can drastically change someone's behavior regarding news. Case in point, me.

Up until recently, I've kept up with the news well enough, but it was always fairly passively. I would stop to listen to the story running on a 24 hour news channel or click on whatever stories interested me when I checked my email or visited a search page. About a year ago, I started using Twitter to follow news or other feeds that interested me, mainly legal related. That wasn't bad, but it was a bit of a pain scrolling through several hours worth of posts and clicking on the links that interested me. (I never said I wasn't lazy.)

Next I tried Google Reader. It's great for a lot of reasons, including the ability to star and share interesting posts as well as the "sort by magic" feature that filters everything based on past history. Still, it's a lot of work. I suppose I could add everything into one category and read it, but then it's a jumbled mess and I find myself always trying to wade through hundreds or thousands of posts to get to the ones that interest me. I've tried to organize everything by category and to prune my Reader frequently and that helps a lot, but it still feels like a bit of a chore.

Enter the iPad. It's more flexible for reading and I find myself using it instead of my laptop more and more often. Unfortunately, reading Google Reader through the iPad web browser worked fairly well, but it was much easier to use on a computer. Reeder was recommended frequently, but at $4.99, it seemed to be a waste of money when Google Reader worked well enough on the iPad and the computer was always a viable option. (On a side note, this is why app developers need to offer free trials of their products. I have no problem with paying for an app that provides a service that I can't get for free or improves upon the free service, but I need to know that the service is worth the money. Had Reeder offered a free trial, I might be using it now.)

Then I discovered Flipboard. It was my favorite price, which is free, so I downloaded it and promptly forgot about it. I started using it again about a week ago, though, and I'm fairly happy with it. You can add your Google Reader account, your Facebook account, and your Twitter account, or you can just use pre-selected feeds like News, Art, Fliptech. You can also add individual blogs or Twitter accounts. What I like most about it is that it shows up as a magazine-like layout. The Twitter section doesn't just show Tweets, it also displays linked articles or photos in some cases. If it just shows a Tweet, I can easily click it and view the whole article. Same with Facebook posts. When my FB friends share a link, I see the entire article or video...or at least a decent teaser. It makes it a lot easier to scan through them to see what interests me the most. I like the Google Reader selection for the same reason, though as far as I can tell, flipping through the headlines doesn't mark them as read. I like the fact that I'm still able to star items or add things to my shared items, but I miss being able to bookmark things with Diigo. Still, it works and I'm more or less happy with it.

I'm also experimenting with Zite, which is about a week old. Supposedly, you can add your Google Reader and Twitter and it gives content based on that. It also claims to learn from your reading habits and give you more of the types of stories that interest you. The good thing about this is that it allows you to get information from sources you wouldn't normally read, which is always a good thing.

I'm not impressed, though. It wasn't bad enough to make me give up on it totally, but it also wasn't good enough to make me give up on Flipboard. First, despite following 40 different Twitter feeds and having 228 subscriptions on Google Reader, Zite wasn't able to generate automatic content for me so I had to add my own. Not a huge problem, but definitely not living up to the hype. Second, it's buggy in a couple of ways. The most noticeable was extremely slow loading times and, at one point, a message saying that it couldn't access content because of too many users. In most cases, it wasn't a huge wait, but I left behind waiting five to ten seconds for a page of text and one picture to load when I gave up dial up. It also crashed a couple of times and I couldn't get linked videos to play. Also, if I clicked on a link to another website or even another story on the site I was reading, it opened Safari. That meant that when I was finished, I had to reopen Zite, wait for it to load, go back to the section I was reading, and start again. I didn't have this problem in Flipboard. Finally, a few things were out of place on categories. It didn't stand out until I got to the humor section and found a story about a tiger killing a lion in a zoo. This wasn't by the Onion and it didn't reference Charlie Sheen, so either their categories are glitchy or someone has a really, really sick sense of humor.

All in all, I do see myself using the iPad more and more for news. I can't see myself paying subscription content, though that might change. What I want is a nice little iPad app that will let me manage all my Google Reader and Twitter content, share or bookmark as needed, and let me easily leaf through all the content. Oh, and introducing new content? It's a positive, but not a requirement. And since I plan to stick with a wifi only iPad, the ability to periodically refresh and store content for offline browsing would be great, too.