A year ago, amid the hubbub of other content publishers deciding if they would embrace the iPad, a smart little startup presented "Flipboard." Flipboard takes all of your favorite content and presents it in a fun "magazine" format that you just flip through. The cover is always a series of images of your selected content, your Twitter feed, or your Facebook stream displayed in trance-enducing Ken Burns fashion. Flipboard captured the imagination of the content publishers. Many have sought to ride its coattails, aggregating their content to the popular platform.
In that year's time, two other contenders have sought to steal a bit of Flipboard's thunder. In my opinion, one is flailing, and one is too new to judge. "Zite" came along offering "Personalized News." It strives to be part magazine, part newspaper, all chosen by you. However, in many ways it presents a lot of the same information that you can pull into Flipboard, but not as elegantly. Zite is good at what it does, but the act of simply pulling in the original article gets old fast. I could just as well surf to the website of the content provider as use Zite. While its "Reader" mode does strip away all of annoying web advertising, it's an extra tap that I would just as soon not have to make. Granted, Flipboard sometimes suffers from this, but it has worked hard to optimize a lot of content to its format while respecting the content provider's branding.
Suddenly, just as I was getting used to using Flipboard for friends, and Zite for more serious content pursuits, comes Google Currents. This reader is a breath of fresh air if you enjoy the cleanliness of Google +. Google's designers give you an uncluttered palette into which you add your preferred content. Currently the pickings are slim, but it's Google! I wholly expect then to have everyone clamoring to be a part of Currents soon enough. Zite could take a lesson from Currents and clean up their interface a bit.
At first the fight was on the iPad, but now all three "news" magazines have scaled down for the iPhone as well, each presenting compelling UI's that will definitely keep me busy while waiting for the doctor. Flipboard's interface is clean, clear, crisp and FUN. Zite gives us the topic carousel in a faux Windows Metro interface. They put big thumbs up / down icons at the bottom of each article so that you can rate it to "see more of that type of content." Its iPhone interface is still a work-in-progress, but I give them props for speeding up content loading. Finally, Currents for iPhone is simply a joy to behold. Content gracefully slides from topic to topic. You can easily choose between your "library" or "trending topics." You can share what you read to all prevailing social networks, but Google+ is recommended before any others.
Flipboard remains my favorite because it has grown smartly to embrace audio and video content as well as text. Zite needs a face lift and has to learn about what I like faster. I expect Currents to expand its influence as well in the months to come, but it won't pose any threat to Flipboard anytime soon.
