SpectatorBytes

In recent weeks, I’ve been increasingly impressed by the attractiveness of the “application reader” experiences on the iPad / iPhone. Flipboard, FLUD and Pulse are good examples. After several weeks of using them, I believe these news readers are ushering in a new era in content aggregation.

These application readers are designed to allow users to easily aggregate their content into personalized “homepages” and to make the consumption of vast amounts of information more easily and enjoyable. These applications use media-heavy designs that allow users to peruse and read RSS feeds and social networking streams from Twitter and Facebook. Unlike traditional RSS readers on the Web, these applications optimize their design to take advantage of tactile navigation, and use images and video to provide magazine-like experiences.

The key advantage these readers have over traditional Web aggregators, such as Huffington Post, Yahoo News, Drudge Report, etc., is that the user can easily optimize their home page to personalize their experience. While personalization has been tried in the past (and has failed in many cases), these readers are leveraging Twitter (and RSS) to make content personalization increasingly simple. Users can create highly tailored “homepages” by “following” a mix of their favorite Twitter streams or Url feeds.

My personal example has evolved around Jason Hirschhorn’s Media reDEFined daily email (Jason is a friend). Jason curates the Web for the most interesting news and information on digital media and related topics. While I always wanted to read Jason’s email, I did not always have the time to read it when I received it. Since I began using Flipboard, however, Jason’s @Media reDEF news stream (available via Twitter) has become one of my most visited sources of information. Jason is now part of my Flipboard “homepage” experience. I now am able to check Media Redefined at least three times a day to see what’s new. In turn, this has made Flipboard a key starting point in my daily internet experience.

This experience has led me to seek other “curators” or “editorial voices” (individuals or content brands) who are putting together interesting streams of information. I want to find people who or brands which satisfy my appetite for a certain editorial voice to cover subjects that I am passionate about. I am beginning to find this good mix of sources which are quickly becoming my daily “starting point”. This process has not been easy, as finding “individual” curators is still difficult via these readers. This is an area in which I foresee these applications to develop further. In any case, ease of access to the myriad of new curators that exist in Twitter is how these readers will likely drive change. RSS readers failed to reach mainstream appeal but I believe the reader applications will succeed at that.

Traditional aggregators will have to face the challenge of the rise of these new aggregators, and all these new content curators these readers will enable to stand out. I expect traditional aggregators will confront these challenges quickly. They may start by optimizing their content experiences for customization. I imagine they will begin to produce more tailored streams of content than they do today. Rather than forcing users to digest their entire experience in a single stream, they may create multiple ones. This would mean that each of these streams would likely have to be updated more frequently and thus offer greater amounts of content than what is currently available in their Web expressions.

All in all, content experiences are about to get more interesting for users. They will more personalized, relevant and frequent. In other words, they will better satisfy users growing appetite for content and information.