Need More for Thing 4

The choices for Thing 4. Keeping Up were a bit lacking for me.

After googling "Flipboard vs. Zite" to get a little background on both, Flipboard was up first. It downloaded OK and the sign up process was easy enough. After picking a few topics and adding a couple specific feeds, I was able to start browsing. It was pretty easy to set up my own magazines to pick organize articles to keep after reading some interesting ones.

After playing with Flipboard for awhile the "wow" factor still hadn't hit me and decided to give Zite a whirl. Right away the format was better suited to me than Flipboard. It was much easier to tell the app which articles I liked and it caught on to my interests much quicker. However, Flipboard's stream seemed more update and complete than Zite.

While good in theory, and both apps had their strong points, neither app was a very good fit for me. One of the major drawbacks of both apps was that there could have been more on each page. Flipping the page so often got old after a while. If what I liked about each app could be combined into one program and more on a page, it might turn into a decent app.

I did run across one app that was helpful while googling for information. If Zite had been just a little more to my taste, using Pocket would have made it a great app. It allows you to save articles to reador refer back to later. It works in Safari, Flipboard, and Zite on the iPad. It also works when it got added to Foxfire on the laptop. I'll need more time to play with this app but so far it seems to be a great thing.

I can see good ways for libraries to use Flipboard and Zite. This would be a great way to share interesting, important, or just to update the whole system information with online.