Flud 2.0: Personalize Your News Experience, Have An Influence

There are many news apps available in the App Store, and today was a big day for a few them. Specifically, Flud. Flud is a personalized, social news experience for iOS and was just updated to version 2.0. It definitely gives Pulse and the also freshly updated Flipboard some competition. Flud is a new way to receive and share news. The app is designed to be your own collection of articles and news, all in a perfect magazine-like interface. Choose the news feeds that you're interested in and add them to Flud — RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, Good Reader, and many other sites, sources, and categories can be added. Open the app, create your custom profile, and start "Fluding." It's as easy as that. Start reading headlines and "like" the articles by "hearting" them; this is called Fluding. This is how you endorse the content that matters to you and let your fellow Fluders know you like it. Flud allows you to not only curate content, but share it with others, or save it to your own reading list to read later. Flud's goal is to create a personalized news interface focusing on the social sharing aspect. Who better to recommend news to you than friends, family, and those you typically turn to for information? Invite your friends, follow your favorite news sources and people, and start sharing. Follow the people you trust to bring you the best news, the news you want to read. Although Flud is kind of its own social network — where you share what you're reading — you can still connect to other social networks to share with them (e.g., Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook). As a blogger, what better way to influence others to read and engage with my content then to create a compilation of my own articles, stories, and content? Even if you're not a Web writer, you can act as one by compiling your own feed of news and influence your Flud followers your own way, with the news that matters to you. The great thing about Flud is you get to see your news visually; interact with it. Not only do you choose which news sources you want to get your news from, you also get to share only the news you want to with your own Flud followers — the news you find important and relevant. By doing so, you influence others as they can see who the information was shared from — you! You will be getting credit for being a curator of information because they can see who Fluded, or shared, a particular article. Have you tried Flud? What do you think of the update?

Flud 2.0 launches your news personality from Bobby Ghoshal on Vimeo.