The Blogosphere in Your Pocket: Regator Comes to the iPhone
Regator, the popular blog directory and feed reader, just launched its iPhone application (iTunes link). The app, which is available for free, allows users to browse stories from over 500 topics, ranging from travel blogs to pop culture and sports blogs - with a bit of beekeeping and local news from around the world thrown in for good measure. Every one of these topics is curated by Regator's staff, which ensures that only high-quality blog feeds make it into the app. Every topic also comes with its own memetracker-like 'popular' view and a list of currently trending terms within each category.
One interesting aspect of the app is that you always have to go to the original source blog to read the full text of each post, no matter whether the blog publishes a full-text feed or not. As the Regator team told us when we first wrote about the company last year, the idea here is to give back to the bloggers featured on the site. One nice aspect of the app is that Regator also displays related stories and images, as well as popular blogs about a specific topic whenever you are looking at a story's summary page.
Besides organizing stories based on popularity, Regator also offers a more traditional view, where stories are displayed in reverse chronological order.
Sharing
Once you bring up a news story, you can also easily share it with your Twitter and Facebook friends right from within the app. While you have to hand over your Twitter credentials, the app has implemented Facebook Connect for sharing stories with your Facebook friends.
Something for Everyone
Because the app covers such a wide range of topics, it really offers something for everyone. You can use it to keep up to date on recent tech events and to see what's hot within the beekeeping community (this story about urban beekeepers is getting quite a lot of attention right now, for example). Because it is curated by Regator's editors and doesn't allow you to add your own feeds, Regator won't replace your current feed reader. However, if you just want to get a quick overview of what's hot in a certain community, Regator does a fine job of giving you access to a nice collection of quality blog posts.
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Another pointless iPhone app that could be served as a webapp.
Frederic - Thanks for the great and even-handed post. You captured exactly what we are going with the app - a handy way to find and share the best blogs on the go without having to set up an rss reader.
Sivian - Regator is first and foremost a web app, so we've got that covered too. :-)
can i import what i already have on google reader. please dont tell me i have to declare them again...
I`m still using Regator iPhone App,not bad
myseodoc.com
regator is a good one
Regator(the website) is like the news water cooler for me...I find stuff there that won't come in my GReader or stuff that I care to find out about.
When I stumble onto a blog about something that I care about, I just add them to my GReader and not worry about looking that up again (for a while) on Regator.
Scott...now about an Android App.... :)
@Scott Lockhart
Instead of an iPhone app you could've created a mobile site accessible to any smartphone.
One gets the impression that this app, like many others on the iPhone, is really a promotional tool rather than an application.
App store addicts will install and try anything even if it offers nothing new over the web version.
Sivian - this iPhone app absolutely serves in a sense as a promotional tool for us. But, it's also a very useful tool for people who want to check blogs and trends on the go without dealing with feeds, etc... The response, across the board, from people who have used it has been exceedingly positive.