This past week, Google launched its new Flipboard-alike Currents app, but Flipboard hasn’t been standing still either. The company launched a scaled-down version of its iPad reader app for the iPhone. (Alas, it requires at least OS 4.0, so it won’t run on my first-generation iPod Touch—not that I’m really surprised.) The app proved to be so popular that the added demand took down Flipboard’s servers for a while after its release. (Something similar happened after the original iPad app was released.) I suspect Flipboard may not have too much to worry about from Currents just yet. Meanwhile, cloud...

Google seems to be sneaking Google+ into everything lately. A couple of days ago it announced it would be integrating Google+ with Google Reader (which worries me a little bit given how much I use Google Reader to try to track down interesting stories to post about here), and TechCrunch also noticed that some users are seeing “Add to circles” buttons showing up on search results that feature blog posts or news articles. The idea seems to be that if you find an interesting blog post or article, you can add its author to your circles and be notified...

AOL has just launched a new iPad app, Editions, which serves up a custom daily "magazine" of content from both its own sites and others (but mostly its own). Like Zite, Flipboard, Pulse, Taptu, Hitpad and a slew of other apps, you can customize the type of content you see, although if you don't like the default suggestions you'll have to connect your social network accounts to it to generate new topics. Editions seems to fall somewhere between Flipboard and The Daily, borrowing a lot of the visual style of the former but packaging itself as a once-a-day digital publication...

"Why can't I subscribe to an author?" asks O'Reilly's Joe Wikert in a post on his personal Kindleville blog last week. He points out that while you can gather all the RSS feeds, Google alerts, and hashtag searches you like, it's not the most efficient way to follow a specific writer's work. Here at Teleread we've highlighted a couple of websites that offer a related service. Book Buzzes watches Amazon and alerts you when an author has a new book coming out, while BookWatch is an iOS app that performs a similar service for iBooks. But those are linked to...

The RSS reader Reeder, which I use every day in refining sources for TeleRead articles, has put out a couple of updates for its iPad and iPhone versions in the last few days. The iPad version is more on the nature of an incremental update, fixing bugs and improving full article view, but the iPhone/iPod Touch version adds support for using Readability to fetch the full text of articles—something which had already come to the iPad version, and which I had been missing from the iPhone version ever since getting another iPod Touch. As with the iPad version...

I just got around to doing a software update on my iPad. Among others it fetched a new update to the Reeder RSS reader, containing a remarkably useful feature that I am extremely glad to have. Although I mentioned the Reeder vs. MobileRSS controversy last week at the time the update actually came out, the nature of the update escaped my notice until now. Reeder has added a Readability button to its user interface. When I encounter a RSS feed that does not provide the whole article (some feeds are especially obnoxious that way—most notably The Bookseller’s, which...

Yesterday, the developer of the Reeder RSS reader (which I’ve found to be the best RSS reader for either iPhone or iPad) noticed that MobileRSS’s latest version had added some disturbing similarities to Reeder’s interface. He posted some comparison shots on his site and tweeted about it, and the forces of indignant social-network-using Reeder fans went to work. It wasn’t long before both Instapaper and Read It Later, two of the major bookmarking/reformat reading services, both threw their support behind Reeder, and shortly afterward MobileRSS’s developer said it would be resubmitting the app with the similarities to Reeder removed....

Shortly after Apple called it the “best iPad app of the year,” awesome social reading app Flipboard has a major new update out that adds a couple of much-requested capabilities to the social network reader for the iPad: it now supports Flickr and Google Reader feeds. As Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb reports, it actually incorporates most of the functions possible in Google Reader, including starring items, sharing items, marking as read, and so on. That’s certainly a lot more than the Pulse RSS reader has yet managed to do. I tried the new feature out, and it...

Adrianne Jeffries at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting piece looking at how the focus of Twitter has shifted over the years. It started out as a way to communicate with friends, sort of instant messaging on a time delay, but its role has changed considerably as more and more people began using it as a way to share links they found interesting—and more and more media sources began making it easy to share links via Twitter. Now, Jeffries writes: Twitter is increasingly about news, content and information in an easily-digestible format. By delivering real-time updates...

Apparently the Pulse RSS reader is feeling a little Flipboard envy. TechCrunch reports that Alphonso Labs, Pulse’s developer, is teaming up with Posterous to allow one-click aggregation of articles into a free Posterous-created blog for each individual user. Something about this seems terribly familiar. Oh, wait. That’s just like what Google Reader does. (Not to mention any RSS app, such as Reeder, that integrates directly with it. And Google Reader lets you read from more feeds, too.) In fact, integration with Google Reader’s starring and sharing system is one of the things that Pulse users have been...

Over the last few days, a new iPad media app called Flipboard has been getting a lot of attention. The app isn’t quite an RSS reader or social networking app, but seems to combine elements of both. The app, though popular, has gotten off to a rocky and slightly controversial start. The rockiness comes in that it seems that Flipboard’s developers were not prepared for just how popular their app was going to be—it seems that everyone was trying to sign up for the service at once, entirely overwhelming their servers. They responded by configuring the servers to...

The Australian reports that the developers of the Pulse RSS reader app for the iPad were invited to address News Corp App World, a private news industry conference held two weeks ago in California. The Pulse reader, you might recall, sparked a minor controversy last month when the New York Times complained about it using the NYT’s feed while charging $3.99 for the app. The article quotes an unnamed News Limited executive making a similar complaint about paid news aggregator apps: "It's quite controversial when someone takes the RSS feed and sells the app,"...