ReadWriteWeb

Yahoo is getting super-serious about the role tablets will play in its future content strategy. On Tuesday, they launched IntoNow, an impressive social TV app for the iPad that marries the check-in functionality of GetGlue with the real-time content identification of Shazam. The next day, the company pushed out LiveStand, another iPad app, this one in the tradition of personalized news reading apps like Flipboard, Zite and AOL's Editions.

The app, which comes in advance of Google's own rumored offering, is pretty well-designed. It has less content sources than many existing players, but what it does have is formatted very nicely.

In the world of personalized news readers on a tablet, the competition is hot between market leader Flipboard, upstart Zite, Feedly and Pulse . Flipboard hardly ever adds new features anymore (they are too busy cutting deals with publishers and reading all their glowing reviews in the iTunes app store) but last night competitor Pulse added a simple little feature that Flipboard and any other mobile or tablet reader ought to add as well: a bookmarklet users can click to save an article from the Web to read later in Pulse.

Conventional wisdom says that asking users to download a browser plug-in or drag and drop a bookmarklet will cause a huge drop in adoption - that drooling is the only operation most web users are able to perform and should define the outer limit of tools offered to them. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore, though. Our desktops and our mobile devices ought to be able to act as seamless if different interfaces for a world of personalized information, streaming above all these particular devices, up in the cloud.

You've probably seen the popular iPad app Flipboard; there are a number of competitors on iOS, most notably Zite. That crowded market looks different on an Android tablet though, so what's an Android tablet owner to do? I've tested the four personalized magazine-style news apps that most closely resemble Flipboard and here are my impressions. These apps are great to kick back with on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee or on a plane ride. (If you can avoid the many conversations people on the plane will want to have with you about your Android tablet.)

The enterprise microblogging and discussion marketplace continues to evolve, as this week TheFlowr.com announced new features and pricing. As we have covered in the past, Socialcast has been acquired by VMware, Yammer has partnered with Netsuite, and a number of traditional enterprise vendors are putting forth their own offerings in this market too.

RSS feeds were a big driver of innovation in the Web 2.0 era. RSS Readers like Bloglines, Newsgator and Google Reader became the go-to services for people to subscribe to the latest news and blog posts. Over the past couple of years, mobile phones have become a major content consumption device. Yet RSS Readers have struggled to make the transition. In part this has been due to the increased importance of Twitter and Facebook for circulating news and information. But it's also because tracking RSS feeds on your smartphone is a user interface challenge - and few, if any, startups have solved it.

This is the third post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. The first post explored the thriving world of music on smartphones and yesterday we looked at news apps on the iPad. Today we analyze RSS on smartphones.

The latest social magazine iPad app to hit the market is NewsMix, a $2.99 app that does much the same thing as the increasingly popular Flipboard. So how much chance does NewsMix have to usurp Flipboard? It's the same chance that online RSS Readers had of usurping Bloglines back in 2004-05, when Bloglines was first to market with a new type of news reading product. Virtually nil.

Just as Bloglines was the first browser-based RSS Reader to gain traction, Flipboard was the first magazine-style iPad reader to gain a following in 2010. Bloglines became the dominant RSS Reader in 2004-05, mostly because it was first to market with a decent product and it scaled well. OK, Bloglines eventually lost the plot when it got acquired by Ask.com and allowed Google Reader to usurp it. The same fate may occur to Flipboard, if/when it gets acquired. But one thing's for sure, it won't be NewsMix that beats Flipboard.

The internet is a big place and a lot happens on it every day. We try to cover the things we find most interesting, but in case you disagree with our judgement, here are some other things that smart people might want to know about today. We offer each with a touch of editorial about what it means - and in some cases why we haven't written about it yet.

Today's almost-news-to-us includes: Amazon doing unnatural things with Wikipedia, Facebook plus Etsy makes me a power shopper, if Groupon is like the Borg - here's who might be the Baby Borg next in line, everyone is talking about an iPad RSS reader that got Facebook integration and Dora the Explorer gets new iOS apps. Awesome!

Earlier today Novell demoed it's Google Wave-like product to the enterprise world. Pulse is the latest workplace collaboration platform to announce at this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference and ReadWriteWeb was lucky enough to catch up with Novell's VP of Engineering Andy Fox for a demo of the new tool. The beta product is expected early next year.