The Future of News (Readers)

I don’t like paying for apps for my iPad.  There are a lot of great apps for free out there so before I spend my dough on some app it had better be good.  Flud costs $3.99 and it’s worth every penny.  It’s a new news feed reader and it just rocks.

Just as Flipboard changed the way folks look at and interact with Twitter and Facebook on the iPad, Flud will take all the news feeds you follow and present them in a beautiful interface that’s designed from the ground up with the iPad in mind. Check out the video to see it in action.

Flud comes already subscribed to a bunch of different blog feeds.  (You can remove any of these if you like.)  The pre-subscribed feeds are for very popular blogs like Mashable, Gizmodo, Uncrate, MTV, and the like.  They have been customized and tweaked for you and they are stunning.  Everything sort of looks like a magazine and you can scroll across to look at posts within a certain feed or scroll up and down to look at other feeds.

Beyond that, you can add your own feeds and even import your feed list from Google Reader.  Be warned that the more feeds you add the slower the app is to load initially.  It’s got to go and grab all that info and it does take a second or two but when you see all the blogs you normally read firing up in this thing it will almost bring a tear to your eye.

Truthfully, some blogs look better than others on Flud but none look bad.  If the blog uses images for each post in a way that Flud understands then each of those images will be brought in to represent the post.  If not, then text from each post is used.

Flud lets you “heart” items which means you can read them later.  This also votes on the item.  Flud tracks the popularity of news feed articles and shows you the most popular in their custom Flud feed.

From within the interface you can heart something, tweet about it, share it on facebook or email it to someone.  You can also open the article in Safari.  It’s all very slick and according to the site it’s “1 great way to stay classy… and sexy.”  You can’t beat that.

Flud switches seamlessly from portrait to landscape mode and just goes with the flow no matter what you do.

The app is still young and I have had it crash on me a couple of times but the team a Flud seem to be pushing out a lot of updates and are killing bugs right and left.

I wish that Flud integrated with Google Reader a little bit more.  I’d love for items I read on Flud to be marked at read on Google Reader.  Perhaps we’ll see that down the road.

The bottom line is that I love this app and I recommend it for anyone that reads a lot of feeds.

You can check it on iTunes here.  And, once you get it installed be sure to add your pal, PastorGear, to your feed list.