Yahoo Launches "Livestand"

One more aggregator. NYTimes: "Yahoo on Thursday announced the debut of Livestand, a publishing platform that aims to deliver personalized content to mobile devices. As The New York Times first reported on Sunday, the platform, a digital newsstand, will offer a continuous stream of programming based on users’ interests. Yahoo plans to push the platform across multiple formats, including tablets, smartphones, and Web browsers, according to the company’s press release."

The Daily vs. Flipboard - Which Wins?

Richard MacManus prefers Flipboard: "Last week Rupert Murdoch's iPad-only newspaper The Daily was launched. The Daily is a newspaper app available to U.S. users on the iPad for 99c per week (the first 2 weeks are free; non-U.S. people can download it for trial via this method). The Daily has been touted as the 'future of the newspaper' by News Corp. Audrey Watters wrote our initial review of The Daily and she was underwhelmed. In my own testing, I've found The Daily to be inferior to my current iPad 'newspaper' of choice: Flipboard. Here's how I came to that conclusion..."

Apps Customize How Users Read Content Online

NYTimes:

One popular tool, Readability, strips articles to the bare minimum of text and photographs with a single click. But now, Readability wants to give something back to publishers.

On Tuesday, the developers behind the tool will unveil a service that requires a subscription fee of at least $5 a month. The service, also called Readability, plans to distribute 70 percent of that fee to the news outlets and blogs that each subscriber is reading.

For example, if a subscriber is a regular visitor to the gadget blog Gizmodo and the women’s news site The Hairpin over the course of a month, Readability will calculate what percentage of her payment should go to each site and send them checks.

“We were never about stripping ads or being an ad blocker,” said Richard Ziade, who created the original Readability tool as well as the second-generation version. Instead, he said, the company has been wondering: “Can we come up with a mechanism to make the experience of reading on the Web better, but also support content creators and publishers?”

Readability is one of many services experimenting with the future of reading. A wave of applications, including Pulse, Flipboard and My Taptu, are responding to changes in how people prefer to read on the Web, putting articles and blog posts into cleaner or more attractive visual displays. ...

Must All Media iPad Apps Be Magazines? TweetMag the Latest

Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb via NYTimes: "Seems like every new media iPad app these days wants to be a magazine. TweetMag is a new content aggregator based around Twitter users, lists and hashtags. It basically focuses on one of Flipboard's features (tweets as content) and expands that concept further. What TweetMag does is look for tweets that include links, then displays it in a magazine format. It starts by creating a 'magazine' out of your own Twitter account, but also offers a collection of popular Twitter users and lists in categories such as Entertainment, Art & Design and Music. ... " I still don't get how the people behind TweetMag, Flipboard, etc. expect to make money.

Social Magazines - What's Their Business Model?

NY Times: "Social magazines is a term that Flipboard came up with. It's come to mean a News Reader type application for the iPad that has the visual appeal of a magazine, along with the social media features common to this era of the Web (integration with Facebook, Twitter and other social apps). Social magazine apps will become a key application for tablets over the next couple of years. Also we will see existing magazines on the iPad, such as Wired and TIME, evolve to become more like Flipboard - with better customization of magazine sections, whizzier UI, more social media functionality, and so on. An important question for Flipboard, NewsMix and other such apps is: how will they make money? Wired, TIME and other specialist magazines will rely on the subscription model (once it gets sorted out for the iPad). However, Flipboard and its ilk face the same issues with monetization as RSS Readers did in the previous Web era. ... "

How Online Reading Habits Have Changed Over 2010

Macmanus, NYTimes: "One of the more subtle trends of 2010 has been the way that our reading habits have changed, due to a convergence of other Web trends: mobile apps, real-time Web (mostly Twitter), and social networking as a way to track news (mostly Facebook). In the previous era of the Web, the so-called Web 2.0, RSS Readers and start pages were all the rage. Over 2010, though, more people used tools like Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Flipboard, LazyWeb, Feedly and TweetDeck, to track news. Nowadays I'm more likely to find stories to read via a vertical aggregator (the media-focused Mediagazer is my current favorite) and save them to Instapaper for later reading via my iPhone or iPad. I still use Google Reader, but in all honesty I now use it more to scan than to read. ... "