Memo to Flipboard, as well as Pulse, CNN’s Zite and AOL’s Editions: You might want to make some room in the already-crowded news and social reader space, because you’re about to get some bigfoot company.

Next Wednesday, according to sources close to the situation, Yahoo will finally officially unveil its offering, called Livestand.

And perhaps as early as next week or in the weeks soon after, Google will also weigh in with its version of the genre — code-named Propeller — which also might be the product’s name. Another moniker under strong consideration: Currents.

As I have previously reported, Google Propeller is an HTML5 reader for the Apple iPad and Android — essentially a souped-up version of similar apps such as Flipboard, AOL’s Editions, Zite (which was just bought by Time Warner’s CNN) and Pulse.

All these apps are part of the drastically changing habits of media consumers, helping users better navigate numerous social and media feeds — such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as news sites and more — using handsome interfaces and touch technologies on tablet devices.

Flipboard, the most prominent and elegant of these offerings, is now available only on the Apple iPad.

Flipboard’s traction among elite users, along with its high-level design ethos and strong reviews, is why Google tried to buy the well-funded company last year, sources said.

But Flipboard — which is backed by some of tech’s biggest venture players, who have invested more than $60 million at a $200 million valuation — declined the kind offer.

At the time, sources said, Google told Flipboard execs that if it did not buy the start-up, it planned to do a version of its own.

Hence, after I heard about the product earlier this year, I dubbed it the Flipinator.

According to sources, Propeller will launch with a plethora of media partners, as well as integration into the Google+ social network. The aim of the search giant is to offer media companies easy tools for publishing content on these devices, as well as a better path to monetization.

That is essentially the same plan at Yahoo, which has been working on Livestand with hopes of it being a product that will woo publishers into tight collaboration with the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Livestand was announced by Yahoo’s now-fired CEO Carol Bartz in February, at a speech at the World Mobile Congress in Spain.

At the time, Bartz demoed a magazinelike platform that would allow publishers to put up content easily and give users the ability to personalize their selections based on search history and interests.

Bartz called it “content in context.” (You can see the demo video below.)

But while Bartz promised the product within three months, development has been slowed by its complex technologies, bugs and the need to sign on publishers.

Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving is pushing the product hard as a way for the company to reinvigorate its media products.

It’s not clear how many publishers Yahoo will have at launch, and neither are the distribution plans, beyond flacking it from the Web site and being present in app stores.

Google, on the other hand, has its Android platform to push out Propeller, although it all must work as well on Apple’s iPad, which is the dominant tablet on the market.

But just because both Yahoo and Google are big companies is by no means a guarantee of success — think Yahoo 360 or Google Wave or Buzz — and their lateness might be a hindrance.

And, in fact, other news reader apps are much further along. The leader, Flipboard, has already had four million downloads and 50 partnerships with leading publishers.

It also has started to introduce rich advertising products and, perhaps most importantly, has tight social integration with Twitter and Facebook.

There will be social elements on both Yahoo’s Livestand and Google’s Propeller. But news reading will be stressed more, making them more like Pulse, a tiny but highly innovative start-up.

Each of the existing apps will presumably compete by adding on more features. Pulse recently added cross-platform, cross-device syncing, while Flipboard is close to unveiling an iPhone version it has said it was working on.

Yahoo and Google PR declined comment.

Here is the Livestand demo video from February:

Earlier today, well-known digerati dude Robert Scoble posted on his social feed on Google+ that the search giant was working on a social and news reader.

“I heard from someone working with Google that Google is working on a Flipboard competitor for both Android and iPad,” posted Scoble. “My source says that the versions he’s seen so far are mind-blowing good.”

If blowing the minds of hot Silicon Valley start-up Flipboard and Facebook is the goal, then Scooby-Don’t's rumor is pretty spot-on.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Google is indeed working on rolling out the new product, which is currently called Propeller.

Sources said Propeller is apparently one of a number of new socially focused announcements Google is prepping, including new apps. But the timing for their launch is unclear.

Here’s what is: Propeller is a souped-up version of similar reader apps such as Flipboard, AOL’s Editions, Yahoo’s Livestand, Zite (which was just bought by Time Warner’s CNN) and Pulse.

Facebook is also making social versions of publications available within its site. So, instead of just seeing a sidebar on a news site of what stories your friends liked, you’ll get a personalized and reformatted version of the latest news when you visit that publication’s page within Facebook.

All these apps are part of the drastically changing habits of media consumers, helping them better navigate numerous social and media feeds — such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as news sites and more — using handsome interfaces and touch technologies.

Flipboard is the most prominent and elegant of these offerings, available only on the Apple iPad. The company is working on an iPhone version, too.

Flipboard’s traction among elite users, along with its high-level design ethos and strong reviews, is why Google tried to buy the well-funded company last year, sources said.

But Flipboard — which is backed by some of tech’s biggest venture players, who have invested more than $60 million at a $200 million valuation — declined the kind offer.

At the time, sources said, Google told Flipboard execs that if it did not buy the start-up, it planned to do a version of its own.

Hence, after I heard about the product earlier this year, I dubbed it the Flipinator.

Propeller is probably a better name, I will admit.

It’s not clear what Google’s Propeller will include in the product, such as Facebook integration, since the pair of Silicon Valley behemoths have not been able to partner over data exchange.

Which is an understatement, I know.

But sources said it would be available on both Apple’s iPad and Google’s Android tablets.

In any case, stay tuned and thanks to Scoobs for the tip!

[Photo credit: This Noogler Propeller Hat -- which is given to all new Googlers -- is in the collection at the Computer History Museum, the gift of Marcin Wichary; the image is by Mark Richards.]

The arena for news readers on tablets and smartphones is competitive, with high-profile efforts such as Flipboard, Livestand from Yahoo, AOL’s Editions and start-ups such as Pulse and Zite.

The reason for CNN’s acquisition interest — as well as look-sees from several other publishers — is not a surprise: As readers turn more toward using these mobile devices to consume content, big media companies are trying to acquire the technology to serve up their fare to them.

It is a dicey arena, though, where content aggregation meets (and crashes into) content lifting. Vancouver-based Zite, for example, was sent a cease-and-desist letter in March, by a panoply of media companies (not CNN!) alleging various copyright violations.

That happened right after it was launched, with $4 million in funding from angel investors and Canadian grants and an innovative personalized article-picking algorithm.

As Liz Gannes wrote then:

[Then] Zite CEO Ali Davar describes the iPad as a way to “emancipate the technology” his team originated at research at the University of British Columbia.

It had previously been put to work in a browser plug-in called Worio. And, as you might have guessed, browser plug-ins are a tough business.

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Last week, a Canadian site called Techvibes first wrote about the possibility of the sale of Zite to CNN, which is based in Atlanta and owned by Time Warner.

In a press release, CNN said Zite would remain a standalone unit, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNN, and that CEO Mark Johnson will continue to run Zite’s operations, but now in San Francisco. CNN also said that Davar will remain an executive director and Mike Klass will continue as CTO.

In a statement, Johnson said: “Zite is thrilled about combining forces with CNN to create a world-class news discovery platform. In CNN, we have found a partner who shares our vision and passion. Being part of the CNN family gives us the capital to grow Zite’s business and continue to innovate in the space.”

Editions by AOL, as the app is known, should hit the iTunes store later today or by Wednesday morning at the latest. The app, as we have previously noted, is designed to be AOL’s entrant in the increasingly crowded field of personalized publications designed exclusively for Apple’s tablet.

Rather than passing out cigars or sending out birth announcements, AOL has been marking the app’s impending arrival in a less savory way. Inside company offices, AOL has replaced its standard toilet paper with specially marked rolls touting the product’s launch. The unusual marketing is due to the product’s internal nickname — The App For When You Crap.

In an interview, AOL mobile head David Temkin attempts to paint a more glowing picture of Editions, calling it more of a daily briefing giving you a mix of the news you want with the news you didn’t even know you wanted. Like a newspaper, Editions is organized into sections, such as local news, business, sports, entertainment and technology. Unlike a traditional fish wrap, however, users can elect which sections they wish to receive and which can be skipped.

The product will compete with a range of other products, including personalized readers like Flipboard, Zite and Pulse as well as the iPad-only Daily from News Corp. (which owns this site) and other iPad variants of traditional newspapers and magazines.

For now there are no ads inside Editions, but that is expected to change over the next couple of months, Temkin said.

Temkin said he is convinced there will be a niche for Editions.

“We’re not trying to be the be-all and end-all,” he said in an interview at AOL’s offices last week. Rather, Temkin said the team worked to create a publication that works well for one particular use — a good quick read of the news in the morning (hence the unfortunate and, I’m afraid, now permanent nickname.)

Unlike feed readers, Temkin said that Editions is a once-daily affair and features a set number of pages, allowing one to finish reading.

“This is huge,” Temkin said. “We want to give people a sense of ‘I did something, I finished this.’”

Indeed, the last page contains a horoscope and a note letting the reader know they have reached the end. Meanwhile, Temkin said that Editions is also unlike The Daily in that the AOL app is highly personalized based on one’s interests, with users able to vote up or down the sources and topics they want to see more or less of, similar to the way users can rate artists in the Pandora music service.

One of the challenges is that the app really needs continuous Internet service to be fully enjoyed, making it somewhat impractical for subway and train commuters whose Web access is inconsistent. Although headlines and some AOL-produced content are downloaded with the full magazine, users have to connect to the Internet each time they want to read a full article from another source, as the application loads a full Web page.

That move makes it more publisher friendly, given that Editions is scraping less content than some rivals, but could prove irksome to those on the go, or who have poor Wi-Fi reception in their restroom.

Editions also has some nice touches. It’s initial page features localized weather as well as a list of upcoming appointments taken from the iPad’s calendar and the week’s birthdays, taken from Facebook if a user chooses to link to Facebook. Although Editions doesn’t pull stories from Facebook or Twitter, it does let users link those accounts and uses the feeds for other information. If a user follows a particular publication on Twitter, for example, Editions will automatically make that a preferred source in Editions.

But is that all there is?

With only a smattering of deliberate exceptions, new sites and apps launch with Facebook Connect to get the network effects of tying into its powerful social graph and potent spamming tools. Instead of attempting to create their own social network, they piggyback on top of Facebook’s.

In fact, one former Google product manager told AllThingsD recently that one of the biggest reasons he left the company to work on a social start-up was so he could use Facebook Connect, something Google discourages.

But while Facebook might be the hottest game in town, it’s still a pretty warped and inaccurate picture of what it means to have friends.

And it all makes me wonder, what are other models of “social” besides Facebook’s current product? Could someone who does social better than Facebook mount a significant competitor to the site? And, most importantly, could they succeed?

Friending Is Broken

One of Facebook’s most fundamental flaws is its notion of friending. Relationships on Facebook don’t naturally expire as they do in the real world. To unfriend is drastic, used only in the direst of circumstances–like a bad breakup.

And the fact that people from so many parts of our lives are on Facebook elicits bland communication. You often don’t really know who you’re talking to, so you stop talking.

Akshay Kothari, CEO of the news app Pulse, only recently started a new Facebook profile. He friended just 15 people: His family, closest friends, and Pulse co-workers. It turned out great, he said–his newsfeed was full of relevant and important information.

But after about two months, Kothari started logging back into the old profile. “It was like a telephone book that I had lost,” he said. Plus, he’d missed out on parties, because he hadn’t seen the event invitations.

You might think that some of these complaints have to do with life in the hyper-connected tech industry–where talking to someone for five minutes at a conference often results in a friend request–and they often do.

But meanwhile, a family member of mine joined Facebook this past year when she started high school. She already has 500 friends. Just imagine how many she’ll have in five years.

Friend overload was part of Facebook’s rationale behind Facebook Groups, 50 million of which have been created in the past six months. Start-ups such as GroupMe and Fridge are focused on groups as well.

But while explicitly designated groups might make great sense for co-workers, or a family, or even a neighborhood, not every relationship fits neatly into a group.

Proximity

One alternative to Facebook’s static friending is dynamically created relationships based on common experiences. The start-up Color, despite its many flaws, is certainly onto something here.

The idea behind Color is to create a collaborative record of a place and time where people were together. The company’s app aggregates users’ photos by location, using factors like GPS as well as sound and light detection.

As compared to Facebook, proximity-based approaches from companies like Color could potentially do a better job of integrating the offline world, and be better at helping us find and meet people we do not already know.

Color, with its big funding and smart team, should have had better intuition about helping people understand and find value from its app.

Even so, it might not have been able to solve the extremely hard problems it is posing.

For instance, how do you get new users to see the value of a social product without connecting to people they already know? How do you do social without the notions of friending or privacy?

Interestingly, Color CEO Bill Nguyen has said Color may add Facebook Connect, as well as tell new users who are not within a reasonable distance of other people to come back later.

Other companies are working around this approach too. The college flirting service LikeALittle, aka LAL, recently released an iPhone app that creates an on-the-fly chat room for any location. Users can see who else is currently present and scroll through a historical stream of photos and statuses posted from that place.

If you’ve checked out Yobongo, the pleasantly designed but often empty iPhone chat room app, the LAL app feels kind of like a hybrid of Color and Yobongo. But there’s a difference: LAL already has millions of users at 450 colleges, so it doesn’t have quite the loneliness problem of the other two apps.

LAL, which is public and anonymous by default, says it’s only for colleges, but when I logged into the app recently I could see active streams for Bay to Breakers, LAL headquarters, and Las Vegas.

Beyond Real Names

But Facebook is not just about friending. The service has become the identity provider for much of the Web–a powerful asset that’s increasingly hard for competitors to challenge.

This real name system has been a core tenet of Facebook since it started, and in many online situations entering a Facebook-approved real name is tantamount to swiping a card that verifies you’re a real person.

But a name, password and profile picture are a two-dimensional version of a person. You could better ensure that someone is who they say they are by adding fingerprint scans, VPN dongles and, perhaps someday, X-ray vision.

Or you could try users’ mobile phones, which are always with them. You could use something like a Google Voice account that rings all their numbers: Home, work and cell. You could incorporate their presence from instant messaging to better indicate availability.

If you think about it, there has to be some sort of virtual unified identity system that’s better than just a real name.

Incidentally, this could be an awfully good way for Google to compete with Facebook.

The Interest Graph

Another meaningful alternate to Facebook’s social graph is the so-called “interest graph,” as best demonstrated by Twitter.

On Twitter and other sites like Quora, people you’re interested in are commingled with topics you’re interested in. Once you follow a critical mass of Twitter accounts, you get a non-stop flow of personalized content.

A weather update combined with a friend’s post about winning a soccer game combined with a breaking news alert plus three heaping servings of self-promotional tweets does get a bit chaotic sometimes, but it’s all stuff you’ve explicitly said you want to hear about.

Twitter may not be a full competitor to Facebook, but it obviously fills a simple and accessible publishing function better than Facebook. And because Twitter is almost completely public, and because it’s designed around one-way relationships, the notion of un-following is less dramatic than un-friending.

But that begs the question: Are public, one-way relationships really all that social?

Distributed Networks

Another approach might be to go the other direction, one toward more privacy. Facebook’s Achilles’ heel is privacy, so one way to defeat the company might be to conceive of a social network that gives more power to users.

Altly is a newly launched company that promises it is building an alternative to Facebook that will be more respectful of users’ information.

Altly CEO Dmitry Shapiro, who was most recently a Myspace executive, wrote a manifesto about his company’s premise:

For every Coke there is a Pepsi, for every Ford there is a Chevy, for every PC there is a Mac and for every Facebook there is…. a void!

Shapiro isn’t the first person with this idea. Last year, Diaspora, which has yet to deliver on its promise of a distributed open source social network, attracted more than 6,000 donations before it even got started. The founders recently promised “we’re still here, and we’re going strong,” although their network is still invite-only.

Another fresh new company called SecretSocial (which operates out of the cute URL https://shh.sh/) allows users to create chat rooms that expire, leaving no data behind, after a user-designated time period of 15 minutes to one week. Organizers can invite participants via SMS, Twitter or phone and then converse without logging in.

Or there’s Path, which uses a one-way relationship model that’s the opposite of Twitter: Users choose whom to share with, instead of whom to follow. Path limits users to sharing their pictures and video with 50 people to encourage them to pick carefully.

A more private social Web site will grow more slowly as it loses the benefit of network effects that Facebook and others so effectively enjoy. Users are probably more likely to choose a site because their friends use it than because it promises to keep them safe.

It’s clear that existing social networks value publicness, for advertising purposes and others. Attempts to regulate privacy could significantly change the social networking dynamic.

Facebook and other companies including Google, Twitter and Zynga are this week aggressively fighting a proposed California law that would make social networks more private by requiring their users to choose privacy settings up front and defaulting all options to private.

Mobile

When you ask tech start-up folks who or what could best compete with Facebook, as I have repeatedly, the most common answer you get is “mobile.”

Said one social start-up CEO:

“The way people use web is very different than the way people view and interact on mobile devices. One company can’t focus on and win on both platforms at the same time since they are so different. There is definitely a chance for companies to compete with Facebook by focusing on mobile.”

The reasoning goes like this: Using a phone is an intimate and personal experience in ways that a Web browser isn’t. It’s also much more connected to the offline real world. Your phone is always with you and knows where you are, and you’re probably the only one who uses it. It has your text and calling contacts.

Plus, competing with a company that has a seven-year, 700 million-member advantage requires ingenuity. Facebook became a viable competitor to Google not by improving search (in fact, Facebook search is awful), but by changing the Web paradigm to include social.

That said, it seems like a cop out to say the best way to compete with Facebook’s version of social is not social, but mobile. But perhaps it’s true.

(Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.)

Phone book photo credit: Flickr user bondidwhat

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Today, BoomTown braved the floods and skippered All Things Digital‘s S.S. Minnow through a Noah-like rainstorm in Silicon Valley to visit the HQ of Pulse.

Last summer, you might recall, co-founders Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta of the nifty visual news-reading app got publicly picked out by Apple’s Steve Jobs in a speech about third-party innovations on the iPad.

It was a high point for the pair of Stanford University students and newbie entrepreneurs–except that the very same day, the New York Times slapped them with a cease and desist for misusing its RSS feed.

Dramatic, for sure, but they have made nice with the Times since then and have also raised more than $1 million in funding from a range of notable venture players.

Compared to a similar start-up–the social news-reading app Flipboard–that’s a very small budget for Pulse, which was making a profit on a paid app but, since it went free in November, it’s not making a profit now.

The move–while it will require a new business plan at some point–allowed Pulse usage to explode, hitting three million users today from 250,000 paid users only four months ago.

A lot of that growth has been on Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android smartphones, rather than on the iPad tablet, where Pulse began.

And, although the Android mobile operating system was the last platform to be introduced, it is the fastest growing one, with over one million users on it, Pulse said.

Pulse launched a 2.0 update for the iPhone and Android today, with “enhanced performance, new content sources and improved sharing with social feeds and news discovery features.”

That means the app is speedier, has more news offerings in more categories and a bigger dollop of social content and sharing tools with Facebook, Twitter and other social networking companies.

Pulse now has eight employees squeezed into its small offices in downtown Palo Alto, CA–complete with the required start-up garage door.

Here’s a video interview I did with Kothari and Gupta this afternoon, just as the sun came out, along with one I did with them in cloudier times last June during the Times’ dopey assault:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110324/video-the-pulse-boys-to-men-talk-about-huge-growth-of-visual-news-reading-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110308/zite-launches-even-more-personalized-ipad-magazine-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20110308/zite-launches-even-more-personalized-ipad-magazine-app/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 05:00:47 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4064 Once upon a time, I subscribed to a thread on the Q&A site Quora on the topic: “Why have personalized news start-ups failed?“

Thirty-six answers later, I was ready to turn off Quora email notifications. Let’s just say, it’s a pretty rich topic.

But personalized news start-ups may well have more life in them, and that’s primarily because of the tablet content consumption experience. As demonstrated by all the fuss around iPad apps like Flipboard and Pulse, people like the idea of a a touchable digital magazine.

And today, another one is launching, called Zite, which boasts a carefully honed personalized article-picking algorithm.

Zite CEO Ali Davar describes the iPad as a way to “emancipate the technology” his team originated at research at the University of British Columbia.

It had previously been put to work in a browser plug-in called Worio. And, as you might have guessed, browser plug-ins are a tough business.

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110308/zite-launches-even-more-personalized-ipad-magazine-app/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110102/a-few-holiday-photos-from-techs-cool-kids-what-they-did-on-winter-vacation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110102/a-few-holiday-photos-from-techs-cool-kids-what-they-did-on-winter-vacation/#comments Sun, 02 Jan 2011 15:00:19 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34606 For many in tech, 2010 was the year of photo sharing.

With higher-resolution cameras in our smartphones, everyone seemed to be adding social photo posting to their apps.

Hi-res photos hit Facebook, pictures came to Foursquare, and phones filled with apps to crop, stretch, filter, sketch and generally punch up our often marginal photography.

So, in honor of a big year of sharing photos with friends, here is a quick gallery of shots from the holidays, gathered with care from the walls and feeds of a few of tech’s most social shutterbugs.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110102/a-few-holiday-photos-from-techs-cool-kids-what-they-did-on-winter-vacation/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/flipboard-partners-with-web-publishers-for-full-content-full-disclosure-including-atd/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/flipboard-partners-with-web-publishers-for-full-content-full-disclosure-including-atd/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:22:33 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=956 Yesterday, I wrote about Pulse, a news-reading app with innovative design, going social by integrating Facebook.

Now Flipboard, a social news-reading app based around Twitter and Facebook, is adding publisher feeds.

One thing’s clear: There’s a lot of excitement and energy going into how the iPad can re-create content consumption.

Flipboard is launching a beta test with eight publishers, including, full disclosure, All Things Digital.

The other publishers are ABC News, Bon Appétit, Lonely Planet, SB Nation, SFGate, Uncrate and the Washington Post Magazine.

Participating advertisers, through a partnership with OMD, include Pepsi, Gatorade, Infiniti, the CW Television Network, Showtime, Levi’s, Dockers, Hilton Worldwide, GE, Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Project (RED), Standup2cancer.org and Charity: Water.

They are contributing full-page ads that are inserted into longer-form articles.

During the beta period, no money will change hands between any of these parties, including our site, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue.

Later, McCue said he expects to add many more publishers to the Flipboard app, and perhaps help publishers create their own “iPadified” content experiences to distribute themselves.

Instead of prompting users to go to the iPad’s Safari browser to read full versions of articles, as it has done to date, Flipboard will now import partner publisher content and lay it out automatically. For these stories, Flipboard formats images, divides them into pages and offers different layouts for portrait and landscape modes.

McCue said Flipboard users’ No. 1 most requested feature is the ability to add content through RSS feeds.

But he’s not giving them that with this update. Users can still only subscribe to publishers through Twitter accounts and lists. The reason, according to McCue, is Flipboard is dedicated to the social aspect and beautiful design of content, and RSS contains neither of these things.

McCue speaks of scrolling through Web pages with advertising units and side bars as a relic of the early Web and crappy Internet connections, saying Flipboard represents a return to the pagination and image emphasis of print.

Unlike print, though, Flipboard doesn’t work offline; that’s a future feature, said McCue. He also said his team is still singularly devoted to developing for iPad, and will divert focus to Android tablets only after they have an established user base.

By the way–more full disclosure–seeing ATD content get iPadified in McCue’s demo wasn’t as fun and glossy as you might imagine, especially given our small images.

And in what might be a problem for other content publishers like us, the quick blog posts we often write are not as easily transferable to this layout, given Flipboard does not yet differentiate between short stories and longer articles.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/flipboard-partners-with-web-publishers-for-full-content-full-disclosure-including-atd/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101201/pulse-news-app-gets-social/ http://allthingsd.com/20101201/pulse-news-app-gets-social/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:00:15 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=928 Pulse, the visually engaging mobile news reader, is adding a social element today. To date, Pulse (for iPad, iPhone and Android) gave users an easily scannable and image-driven view of their favorite RSS feeds. Now, users will also be able to add their Facebook accounts and flip through material posted by their friends.

The social version of Pulse will be available only for iPad for now, and is to be released this afternoon at 3 pm PT.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Alphonso Labs, which makes Pulse, recently stopped charging for its apps and raised $800,000 in venture funding. CEO Akshay Kothari came up to San Francisco today and showed me the new iPad app.

The new Pulse for iPad gives users three feeds of Facebook information: Friends’ status updates, friends’ shared links and a historial look at the user’s own Facebook wall. In keeping with Pulse’s design, items are image driven and easily swipe-able, and expand into a second panel when users tap on them (see screenshots). Users can add comments or “Like” statuses and shared links as they would on Facebook, but this is more of an alternate way to consume content than a full-featured Facebook client.

As with other content feeds, Pulse caches the 25 most recent Facebook updates in each category, so a user who goes somewhere without Internet access could continue to read the content there.

As Alphonso grows from being some young folks with an interesting design approach into a real company, it is exploring closer relationships with publishers like the Huffington Post. “We don’t want to be a company that makes a news reader,” said Kothari. “We want to help people discover awesome content.”

Kothari added that with the influx of new users since Pulse went free two weeks ago, Alphonso is looking to improve content discovery by mining user data to show a “most-emailed” story list across all feeds.

He said his aim is to get away from the hierarchical structure of Web sites–where one must return to the homepage before moving on–and help people scan quickly through potential reading material. Ultimately, Kothari said, recommendations will be done through a balanced combination of machine and social factors.

Further reading: Earlier this year, Pulse was mentioned as an example app by Steve Jobs, then yanked from the App Store due to complaints about content usage by the New York Times. The app was quickly reinstated and Alphonso has an open dialogue with the Times about how best to send it new readers and subscribers, according to Kothari.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101201/pulse-news-app-gets-social/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101005/docomo-looks-to-rescue-long-distance-relationships/ http://allthingsd.com/20101005/docomo-looks-to-rescue-long-distance-relationships/#comments Tue, 05 Oct 2010 14:50:47 +0000 Daisuke Wakabayashi http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30659 Maintaining a long distance relationship can be tough but modern technology–mobile phones, Skype, instant messaging–has made things a little easier. NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan’s biggest mobile carrier, thinks it can take things to the next level by helping long-distance couples share “non-verbal” communication.

In a product demonstration in its booth at this week’s Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies, also known as CEATEC, DoCoMo exhibited a device and mobile application called the “Taion Heart”, translated as the body temperature heart. The white plastic heart fits in the palm of your hand and when squeezed, it registers a pulse reading as well as the pressure with which you are squeezing the device.

That information is relayed by a wireless Bluetooth connection to a mobile phone running the application and is passed onto your partner’s phone, which in turn beams the information to their corresponding Taion Heart.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101005/docomo-looks-to-rescue-long-distance-relationships/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:56:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30973

Today, BoomTown gassed up the MINI and headed down to see one of the more innovative new start-ups I have encountered of late.

That would be a new social magazine concept called Flipboard, which is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via a rich app on the Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard decloaked itself tonight, announcing both a $10.5 million funding from top Silicon Valley power players and also the acquisition of Ellerdale, a relevancy search engine for the real-time Web.

The funders include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of high-profile investors, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, angel investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. (NWS) exec Peter Chernin.

Flipboard currently has about 20 employees at its downtown Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“Flipboard is a social magazine filled with all the the things your friends are sharing,” said McCue, who co-founded Tellme, the speech recognition service acquired by Microsoft (MSFT). “We’re trying to bring the timeless principles of print to social media.”

(You can read The Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret’s review of Flipboard here.)

McCue left Tellme a year ago and was casting about for a new start-up when he settled on creating a new way to digest and present the noisy flood of information being spewed 24/7 by social networks.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, who backed Tellme, said he was immediately intrigued by the idea.

“It is at once intimate and alive and beautiful,” he said in an interview with me earlier today. “This is the next wave of social media and redefines what magazine is…and I think it will be one of the defining apps on the iPad.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

Ellen Pao, also of Kleiner and a member of Flipboard’s board, said she hoped publishers, whose Web sites are reconfigured from tweets and other social links by the app, will welcome the new distribution format.

“Traditional publishing is facing a crossroads and this imagines it from the ground up,” she said. “I hope it paves the way.”

We’ll see about old media reactions, which has been decidedly mixed to aggregation apps like this.

The New York Times (NYT), for example, attacked rather than embraced another terrific news reading iPad app called Pulse, accusing it of misusing its content.

It was a stupid move against inexorable concepts such as Pulse and Flipboard, which are beginning to make sense of the changing digital information landscape.

Here’s the video interview with McCue, followed by the official press releases about Flipboard:

FLIPBOARD LAUNCHES WORLD’S FIRST SOCIAL MAGAZINE

INSPIRED BY THE BEAUTY OF PRINT AND DESIGNED FOR iPAD, FLIPBOARD TRANSFORMS THE SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCE

Raises $10.5MM From Legendary Investors KPCB and Index Ventures and Media Innovators Including Jack Dorsey, Dustin Moskovitz, Ashton Kutcher and The Chernin Group

Acquires Ellerdale, Names Arthur van Hoff CTO

FORTUNE BRAINSTORM TECH–ASPEN, COLORADO – JULY 21, 2010–Founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple®, Flipboard™ began a quest today to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of it’s Flipboard App for iPad™, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. Flipboard’s first public demo will happen at the FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado at 4:40pm MDT tomorrow.

“With over 1 billion posts shared every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”

Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and “flip” open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine.

The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. Choose from Flipboard’s suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter lists to make Flipboard even more personal.

The Flipboard App is available for free at www.flipboard.com or from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

ACQUISITION OF ELLERDALE
As part of it’s quest to fundamentally improve the social media experience, Flipboard also announced the acquisition of Ellerdale (see press release: “Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale”). Ellerdale’s advanced semantic analysis of large, real-time data streams will enable Flipboard to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks. Flipboard will also retain the world-class engineering team at Ellerdale, including Arthur van Hoff, a leading Silicon Valley technologist who played a major role in the creation of Java. Arthur will become Flipboard’s Chief Technology Officer and spearhead the company’s technology strategy.

INVESTORS
Flipboard is backed by legendary investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures. Other key investors also include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Ron Conway, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, and Ashton Kutcher. The company has raised $10.5 million in a Series A venture capital round.

FLIPBOARD ACQUIRES ELLERDALE TO BOOST CONTENT RELEVANCY IN NEW SOCIAL MAGAZINE

Arthur van Hoff Joins Flipboard as Chief Technology Officer

PALO ALTO, Calif.–July 21, 2010–Flipboard today announced it has acquired Ellerdale, the real-time Web intelligence company. The acquisition concurs with the launch of Flipboard, a social magazine designed for Apple’s iPad, which provides a faster and more engaging way to discover, view, and share what matters on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ellerdale, founded in 2008, has developed a Web Intelligence technology that applies semantic analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed over 6 billion messages from around the social Web and currently processes nearly 70 million messages per day. This technology and data set will be become the relevancy engine for the next release of Flipboard, enhancing the reader’s experience by always surfacing the most important and personally interesting information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Designed from the ground up for the iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. With Ellerdale’s technology, future versions of Flipboard will be able to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks.

“Ellerdale has developed an impressive solution for understanding the ever-increasing stream of social data coming at us every day,” said Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of Flipboard. “This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers, enabling us to present social content in a way that is not only more beautiful, but also more meaningful. It’s a great combination.”

Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale, is joining Flipboard as the company’s new chief technology officer. Van Hoff, who played a major role in the development of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, and was founder of six high-tech companies, including Marimba, Strangeberry and Zing, will spearhead Flipboard’s technology strategy.

“Combining the two companies creates a situation in which one plus one equals three, bringing together Flipboard’s innovative front-end with Ellerdale’s powerful real-time relevancy engine on the back-end,” said Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale and Flipboard’s new chief technology officer. “Our technology will play a key role in providing readers with the content that matters most to them.”

Mike McCue and Evan Doll founded Flipboard earlier this year and received $10.5M in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. The founding team members come from Apple, Netflix, Tellme/Microsoft, Aardvark and Adobe. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100720/meet-flipboard-mike-mccue-talks-about-stealth-social-magazine-start-up-that-just-nabbed-10-5-million/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20100608/pulse-ipad-app-returns-to-the-app-store/ http://allthingsd.com/20100608/pulse-ipad-app-returns-to-the-app-store/#comments Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:31:20 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=42042 Pulse, the iPad news reader lauded by Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his WWDC keynote Monday only to be pulled from App Store hours later after a complaint from the New York Times Company, has been reinstated. Earlier this afternoon, Pulse returned to the App Store–though it’s not quite clear why.

The Stanford University graduate students who designed the app say they submitted a new version to Apple (AAPL) that doesn’t preload the Times’ RSS feed, but as far as they know, it is still awaiting review. In other words, the app that’s currently available on iTunes appears to be the original version that inspired the takedown request.

I own the app and a quick check of my iTunes account shows no updates yet available for Pulse. And on my iPad, it’s still pulling in an RSS feed from the Times.

I have asked Apple and the Times for comment and will update here if I hear back.

In the meantime, here’s the New York Times (NYT) explanation for why it complained about the app in the first place.

The Terms of Use on our RSS feeds makes it clear that the RSS feeds are available for non-commercial use only. By charging for an app ($3.99) that gives users access to our RSS feeds, they are violating that provision of the Terms of Use. Furthermore, when a user clicks on a story in the News Pulse Reader, it takes them to the nytimes.com site, which is framed within the News Pulse Reader app browser, as opposed to taking them directly to our site.  (Since our RSS is not full text, once a user of any of our RSS feeds views the RSS headline/summary of any of our articles, a user can click a button in the app labeled “Web” & this opens our Web site up but keeps the user within the App.) This is a violation of the nytimes.com Terms of Use. Finally, they are using the Times name/content to promote their app, particularly because the Times RSS feed comes preloaded on the App and we are featured in their demonstration video:  http://www.alphonsolabs.com/video

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100608/pulse-ipad-app-returns-to-the-app-store/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090310/app-aims-to-up-social-status-of-some-basic-cellphones/ http://allthingsd.com/20090310/app-aims-to-up-social-status-of-some-basic-cellphones/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:46:03 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090310/app-aims-to-up-social-status-of-some-basic-cellphones/ Believe it or not, there are people who want nothing to do with smart phones like BlackBerrys and iPhones — they just want a basic cellphone for making and receiving calls. Maybe it’s because they think smart phones are too big or too expensive. But as email becomes harder to miss and social-networking sites grow more popular, these people might start to feel a twinge of smart-phone envy, and wish that they, too, had a way to stay plugged in.

Notifier’s home screen condenses quick snapshots of data from various sources into: “New,” “My Update” and “My Stream.”

For the past week, I’ve been testing an application called Notifier by iSkoot Inc. (iSkoot.com), which is designed to give basic cellphones a smart-phone-like shot in the arm. Notifier aggregates updates from various sources and social communities — including email, Facebook, Twitter, news feeds and instant messaging — into one application made for no-frills phones.

I tried Notifier on a Samsung Propel that costs $50 with a two-year contract and rebate. I appreciated the app’s way of keeping so much content in one spot, which saved me from checking various places for information. And Notifier is designed so you should need to sign into an account only once. But I found serious drawbacks in the experience.

Unlike on a BlackBerry or an iPhone, on which you can place programs you use frequently on the very first screen, Notifier is buried on the phone in a section called “My Stuff,” under a section called “Games and Apps,” which takes 10 clicks to reach. That’s a tremendous pain when you just want to quickly check Facebook. There aren’t any shortcuts or hard keys on phones that will open Notifier more quickly.

Second, Notifier’s user interface can be awkward. Posting updates to my social networks through Notifier was a clumsy process that was riddled with extra steps. My phone even had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but I preferred to use Notifier for its namesake purpose: It “notified” me of news like friends’ status updates, new messages (tweets) on Twitter and RSS news feeds.

Notifier costs $3 monthly and is exclusively available on roughly 30 AT&T (T) phones, 21 of which don’t have QWERTY keyboards. AT&T advises people who use it to do so with a data plan; these start at $15 monthly for unlimited data without text messaging. You must buy Notifier in AT&T’s online store, MEdia Mall.

Smart phones are flush with apps that aggregate content from several social networks into one spot, including Xumii for the BlackBerry or iPhone and a feature called Pulse in Yahoo’s (YHOO) oneConnect for the iPhone. There’s even a fun — though not too functional — iPhone app called Ziibii that floats social-network tidbits down an on-screen river.

Whether they’re on smart phones or basic cellphones, apps that display a lot of data in one condensed place need to do so clearly. Notifier does this by displaying a ribbon of icons at the top of the phone’s screen that it calls the carousel, and you can move the phone’s directional arrows left or right to switch from one program to the next. Whatever icon is highlighted in the carousel is the program that appears on the rest of the screen.

A tiny house icon represents the home screen, where three categories of boxes show quick snapshots of data: “New,” “My Update” and “My Stream.” The top box, labeled New, shows names of programs with numbers to show how many new items, or updates, were submitted to that program. For example, “Inbox: 3″ means that three new emails were received; “Feeds: 54″ represents 54 newly received snippets of news from an easy-to-use RSS reader built into Notifier.

Below this data are the My Update and My Stream sections, with left and right arrows to let you scan through various subcategories within each section. My Update shows your status on the various social networking sites.

I found My Stream to be a little confusing. It lets you arrow left or right to see what’s going on in your social network — if you received a new email, for instance, or someone sent you an instant message. But because you’re arrowing left or right, not up and down in a list, it’s hard to find the beginning of this stream. And Facebook notifications are a little too vague; one might say, “Barbie Roberts updated her Facebook profile,” without telling you what she did to update it.

Another Facebook glitch that I ran into was that I had to sign in more than once. This could be a hassle if you’re on the road and nowhere near a computer. In one instance, I was signed in and typed out a status update, but had to sign into Facebook yet again to post my new status. ISkoot says this and other Facebook navigation issues will be fixed within a week.

I flicked through My Stream while standing in line to board a plane and minimized the Notifier screen to get back to the phone’s functionality. Notifier can alert you of new messages even when it’s minimized. This works because the app stays connected to the network, so when you get a new message on Facebook, an email or an instant message, an indicator pops up asking if you’d like to open up the Notifier screen.

The trouble with this indicator is that it doesn’t specify what kind of message you received. I care a lot more about email and instant messages than I do about Facebook messages and would rather not be notified about Facebook. And messages received in the Facebook inbox won’t display in Notifier’s “New” inbox; instead users must take an extra step out to the browser. The company says it’s working on fixing this.

I liked the Notifier news feeds, which were easy to set up. A technology category offered content from 11 sources, and the entertainment category’s seven sources ranged from Rolling Stone to the Onion to Perez Hilton. These feeds are mixed into My Stream, like email or any other news from your network.

Instant messaging, however, required too many steps. It took a while for buddy lists to load. When I selected a person’s name to start an IM conversation, a white screen appeared that looked like a place where I could type my message, but I had to select a “Write” option to skip to another screen and start composing. Likewise, emails couldn’t be typed on the screen of the message itself; rather, you have to open a separate screen for text entry. You might get used to this after a while, but it felt clumsy to me.

Notifier’s extra $18 monthly cost (not including a voice plan) might be worthwhile if you just need a way to stay plugged in and notified of the latest goings-on with friends and email. And compared with the cost of a smart phone, it might be an economical alternative. But its awkward interface and poor placement on the cellphone leave a lot of room for improvement.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

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