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.

Pretty Layouts, But Limited Content to Fill Them

Rather than being a direct copy of the much beloved Flipboard, Livestand crosses that popular app with something more like AOL's Editions. It's a personalized content app, but it doesn't pull content from your friends on Twitter and Facebook, nor does it let you plug in any old RSS feed your heart could ever desire. Instead, Yahoo has launched with a list of content partners, whose articles and blog posts are formatted in an attractive, magazine-style layout. From that list, which is anchored heavily by Yahoo's own content properties, you can pick and choose sources that suit your fancy.

In putting it through its paces, we noticed a few minor areas that could use improvement. In some cases, the app only loads the first image in a given post. That's unfortunate, because additional artwork could help make the lovely article detail pages look even lovelier. It's downright unhelpful when the post we're trying to read contains an infographic.

We hesitate to be too harsh, though. The thing did just launch yesterday, and on the whole it's pretty solid.

For users who don't necessarily want to trick their news-reading app out with any content source imaginable, Livestand is a worthwhile product. Users who are already happily settled in to an app like Flipboard, Zite or Pulse are probably going to stay there.

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.

Maybe We've Found the User Experience Problem...and Maybe it is Us.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says that the vast majority of Facebook users can't even be bothered to respond to friend requests - so maybe the day still isn't here when the web can ask anything of its users, even in exchange for the most fabulous functionality.

Maybe the web, maybe all of media, will always be a lean-back experience for the majority of humanity. That would be terrible, but I think it's far too soon to draw that conclusion.The new Pulse bookmarklet lets you save an article you find on the Web into a stream of links you can read later on your mobile device in Pulse.

It's a simple feature but an awfully smart one that more apps ought to support. It's almost silly that Pulse's little bookmark is getting as much media coverage as it is. But in the effort to make everything as simple as possible, to make sure that mainstream users can adopt new technologies better than they did the first wave of Web 2.0 (bookmarklets, RSS, wikis, podcasts) - a lot of functionality gets lost. It is possible that what these social technologies needed was a greater emphasis on design, not a radical decline in functionality. Pulse and Flipboard have a very different ratio of images to text than traditional feed readers - but why does that have to come with handcuffing users from adding their own articles or feeds easily into their readers?

Right now, if you're navigating around the web on your desktop, there's not a really simple, fast way to save an article to read in Flipboard later. That's silly.

Even with the addition of this new feature, Pulse remains hobbled by an inability to import large OPML files of RSS feeds.

It's great to see so much competition in this space; now let's see that competition heat up the pace of innovation and delivery of new features to users.

Taptu and Pulse

Taptu is a lot like Pulse, which is many peoples' favorite way to read news on an Android Tablet. I mean it's a lot like Pulse, now that it's no longer a mobile search app like it used to be.

The background colors are different. It syncs with social media accounts so you can read updates from LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter alongside topical and source-based feeds. Topic granularity is good, the interface is attractive and the app is free.

Syncing with Google Reader is limited to 100 feeds, which makes it of little use to me personally. Pulse is limited as well, but that might not matter to many other people.

FeedSquares

Feedsquares syncs with Google Reader and displays all your subscriptions and articles in an attractive interface of squares. Feedquares is also free and could be visually ideal for some users.

Feedly

Feedly syncs with Google Reader and has no limit to the number of feeds you can import. It offers updates in a very clean layout with more white space than any of the alternatives. It's a cross-platform app that also works on the iPad, iPhone and in desktop browsers. It's a smart, well-developed service. When the iPhone version launched in January, I said it might be the best mobile feed reader on the market.

Those are the best alternatives to Flipboard that I've been able to find for Android tablets. All of them are pretty good and I think Feedly is great. Many other people swear by Pulse. These aren't quite like the magazine type apps you see on iOS, but they can make for a great weekend afternoon of casual reading none the less.

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.

To get a sense of what is currently popular, I polled followers of our @RWW Twitter account - along with followers of my own personal Twitter account @ricmacnz - about their favorite mobile RSS Reader.

5 services stood out as being the most popular among our readers. They were, in alphabetical order:

• Feedly (iPhone / Android)
• Google Reader (optimized for mobile in the browser)
• my6sense (iPhone / Android)
• Pulse (iPhone / Android)
• Reeder (iPhone)

mobileRSS (iPhone) and Byline (iPhone) were also mentioned multiple times.

User Experience of Mobile RSS Readers

Of the top 5 services according to RWW readers, the mobile version of Google Reader is the most conventional. It lists out your folders and feeds, then you click on them to scan and view stories. It works fairly well, although the main issue is that it's not as easy to scan stories as it is on a PC. That's not the fault of Google Reader. Rather it's the much smaller screen space on a smartphone, which means you end up spending a lot of time swiping and scrolling.

That in a nutshell is why RSS Readers have struggled to get take-up on smartphones. It's just too much work on a mobile phone to use an RSS Reader as it is intended, to scan hundreds or even thousands of feeds.

The other 4 services in our top 5 list have taken more innovative approaches to solve this problem. Although it should be noted that 3 of them use Google Reader as a platform for the actual feeds (Pulse is the only one not to).

My6sense filters your feeds and attempts to automatically select the most "relevant" stories to you. It also offers a time-based list of feeds and stories, but its main reason for being is to convert you to the relevance filter. So far this new type of feed reading hasn't taken off in a big way. It reminds me of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" option, in that you have to trust that the software will deliver you the results you want. I wonder whether modern Web users have the patience to build up that trust in my6sense.

Another app taking an innovative approach to mobile RSS Readers is Feedly, a personal favorite of ReadWriteWeb's resident RSS expert Marshall Kirkpatrick. Marshall reviewed Feedly in January, noting its "attractive folder-based navigation that's easy to thumb through horizontally." Similar to my6sense, Feedly filters your feeds. In Feedly's case, it uses a popularity metric to pick out key items. For example, in my 'Internet of Things' folder from Google Reader, Feedly selected two pages worth of items to show me (9 items, to be exact).

Work in Progress

In conclusion, it's fair to say that RSS reading on smartphones is not yet a solved problem. There is no efficient way to scan through hundreds of feeds on a mobile phone, so apps like my6sense and Feedly have chosen to take a filtering approach.

It's partly a software issue. Filtering is a mix of art and science; it's hard to get it right. But also it's a shift in user experience. RSS Readers never really became mainstream on computers and those who do use them - power users or people who need to track information for their job - haven't yet become comfortable with RSS Readers filtering their feeds. Web users have become accustomed to letting people filter information via Twitter or Facebook, so perhaps it's just a matter of time before they let software do filtering too.

Let us know in the comments if you use an RSS Reader on your smartphone; and if so what your experience has been like.

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.

Both products are visually slick, which as users we've come to expect in an iPad app modeled after a digital magazine. This is clearly a trend in the 'news reader' market currently, iPad apps that are visually appealing and which integrate social media services like Facebook and Twitter. NewsMix and Flipboard both pull content in from the likes of Twitter and Facebook, as well as allow users to 'share' it out again via those same services or via email.

NewsMix does a particularly good job with its video and photo sections, which are separated out and highlighted on the main page. It's a nice idea, because sometimes you just want to relax and watch a video... or look at a photo of a bathing hedgehog.

Even if this is a fairly oranges and oranges comparison, the fact that NewsMix does not allow the user to customize their sections is a big minus. I like how Flipboard allows me to create a special section based on my Twitter list for RWW staff, for example. In NewsMix I cannot do that. To become a default news reader application on the iPad in this day and age, the app has to allow the user to customize what they see. NewsMix should rectify this.

I also prefer the Flipboard user experience, the page-turning UI is wonderful and feels more fluid when browsing. Perhaps that's because I've become familiar with it, over time. Again, another advantage the first mover has. Innovative companies like Flipboard introduce a new type of product and, if it gets traction, they end up setting expectations about what such products should deliver.

It's healthy though to see more "social magazine" apps come onto the market. Other apps in this space worth keeping an eye on include Pulse News Reader, Reeder, FLUD, TweetMag and the upcoming Betaworks app (currently in private beta) News.me.

Right now the activity is all iPad focused, but 2011 is expected to be a big year for tablets in general. So we'll see other apps like Flipboard and NewsMix coming to Android tablets, Windows tablets, and more before the year is out.

For now I'm sticking with Flipboard and I'm betting most of Flipboard's current users will too. If you're an iPad user, which app are you using for news reading?

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!

Caroline McCarthy covered this on CNet. It's limited to books for now but the company says it will be rolled out to other sites in the future. One Wikipedian we talked to called it "slimy BS" and I'm apt to agree. Incidentally, Seth Godin blogged today that Wikipedia doesn't run ads on its own site because the Foundation behind it "wants you to own it" through personal investment and donations. Makes sense. Maybe Amazon didn't just mistreat Wikipedia then - maybe it mistreated you.

Facebook + Etsy = Awesome Personalized Christmas Gift Guides

Login with Facebook on this Etsy page and it will recommend handcrafted and vintage gifts based on the interests of your friends and family members. It uses the structured data of peoples' Facebook "Likes" as search queries across Etsy. Set upper and lower price limits, filter by international shipping, it's great. It even recommended some cool gifts that I'd be proud to give and that I think would be well received by some of the dorkiest people in my life. I've been meaning to write about this one for days, ever since Dan Frommer called it "brilliant" this weekend.

I just haven't been able to prioritize writing about this, even though it's super cool, because shopping isn't really that interesting or important. Am I right?

Groupon Competitors - Who Might be Next in the Group Buying M&A Frenzy?

Venture capital and startup analytics service Chubby Brain shares some research. For what it's worth, I think the news that Google is trying to buy Groupon is painfully boring. The internet is a beautiful thing full of world-changing potential. Coupons? Boring! Of course, if you disagree with me then you might like our technical interview: Groupon's Development Philosophy: Really Short Iterations

Pulse, the iPad Newsreader Many People Love, Gets Facebook Integration

Everybody wants to be compared to Flipboard these days, but no one is doing as good a job as Flipboard. This news got so much coverage today, though! In addition to the AllThingsD coverage linked-to above, this got write-ups in TechCrunch, Mashable and The Next Web today! Facebook integration for an iPad feed reader!

Celebrities will not Tweet! To mark World AIDS day. The Daily What mocks the effort mercilessly and with intelligence.

Dora the Explorer launches iPhone and iPad apps in time for Christmas - very cool.

I can't believe ReadWriteWeb didn't cover that! Except...I guess we just did.

An Open Social Web

Plaxo's Pulse platform, mistakenly thought of by some as just another social network, is actually an attempt at an open version of the social web where sites inter-operate with each other. Currently Pulse supports integration with flickr, YouTube, digg, LiveJournal, Windows Live, del.icio.us, yelp, MySpace, webshots, last.fm, Pownce, xanga, tumblr, jaiku, twitter, smugmug, Yahoo 360, Picasa, and Amazon.

A great example of the type of interaction Pulse aims to achieve on their platform is the new two-way synchronization feature between Pulse and Twitter. A little over a week ago, Pulse quietly launched a "status" feature. Then a few days ago, they announced that this feature could now be used to synchronize with Twitter, two-way. If you set up your Pulse status to sync to Twitter, when you update your status in Pulse, it instantly updates in Twitter. You can also update in Twitter, and this will be synced back to Pulse. And if you have the Twitter Facebook app installed, it will update there, too.

Dynamic Public Profiles

With the launch of Google's Social Graph API, Pulse is now giving users the ability to create a unified public profile enriched by some or all of the aggregated content streams from the social web.  Pulse uses the API to gather together your various URLs on the web to create a public identity that you can control. With this, you can manage your own data and content and determine how you want to present it to the world.

This is a new sort of public profile page. Instead of a being a static page, like the one you would have on MySpace, the page is constantly being updated by your stream of content that you create all over the web.

The public profiles are a completely opt-in feature. You decide for yourself what content and information is included. The resulting pages are tagged with microformats, so your profile page is readable by Google and other web sites.

Over the next few weeks, Plaxo promises to introduce even more in this area, as this is just the first release.

To get started setting up your Public Profile, Plaxo members can go to Pulse, then click on "My Profile" at the top. On the left-hand side, click on the "Public Profile" link to begin.