Flud News – a solid, social news reader app
by Toni McQuilken
Aug 8, 2012 12:05 PM –
Install
Flud News is a social news reader in which you share news stories with friends to gauge what’s interesting to your group. Beautifully designed and easy to use, let’s see if this is the end-all app for all your RSS and news consumption needs in this app review!
Price: Free
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Content Rating: Low Maturity
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- A very beautiful way to get your news!
- If you share with friends, then stories are ranked based on your group’s popularity!
- A wide range of feeds to cater to any interest!
Cons
- The ability to link Google Reader never worked for me.
Features:
In the world of news feed readers, I have tried almost all of them in search of the perfect way to consume my news of choice. Flud is the latest in that line of news apps that I’ve tried, and it has some high and low points.
I’ll start with my biggest issue with the app – the Google Reader integration. For convenience and syncing, I use Google Reader as the source of my feeds, and I want an app to link to and sync with the feeds there, so when I want to read them from various devices, I can be assured of getting only the items I haven’t seen yet. The ability is there in the settings in Flud – but I couldn’t ever get it to work for me. Every time I tried, I got an error message that said it wasn’t available right now. Most of the feeds I subscribe to are available to select in Flud, so it’s not really that I can’t get the same content – it’s that I have to go through and individually find them all again, instead of just being able to import them.
Another very minor complaint is that clicking on an article will bring up the first few paragraphs, but if you want to read more, you have to click through and load it in your browser. I would like to see the option to view the whole story within the app.
Beyond that, this is actually an interesting news reader. It’s a solid way to consume feeds. It’s a very pretty reader, with big pictures and headlines, and a layout that reminds me more of Pulse than the list format Google Reader uses. You can view the most fludded articles, or go through each stream to view them. I would like to see a combined list of everything so I don’t have to scroll through each feed, but that’s a minor complaint.
The social aspect, though, is what makes Flud stand apart. If you follow friends, then as you read articles, they’ll get moved up in the rankings. So you can see what, as a group, you find more important. If you have friends or follow people with similar interests, this means the articles you’ll be most likely to be interested in will be at the top, cutting down on your scroll time.
Watch on Mobile
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Flud Stream
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Flud News
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Flud Add Sources
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Flud Feed List
Usefulness:
If you’re looking for a way to not only read news, but share among friends, then this is definitely a useful app.
Ease of Use:
I didn’t have any problems setting up the app or using it, beyond the error messages trying to link my Google Reader account.
Frequently Used:
If you’re like me, you read your news a few times a day, to see what’s going on. If that’s the case, then this will be a go-to app for your daily life.
Interface:
Overall the interface is very nice. I like having big pictures, and clicking on a story gives you the first couple of paragraphs, plus the ability to share it with your followers. I wish you could view the whole article in the app instead of being directed to the browser, but it’s a minor issue.