Streamglider Takes On Flipboard And Pulse With Sleek Social Interest And News Reader For The iPad
Streamglider is launching its iPad app today, hoping to disrupt the tablet news consumption and social reader space. Despite competition from Flipboard, Pulse, and many others …
Context & Ripple Effects
The social reader on iPad has become one of the most contested categories in apps. Apple crowned Flipboard its iPad App of the Year at the end of 2010, and 2011 brought a wave of challengers: VodPod's Showyou applied the Flipboard format to social video, and The New York Times-backed News.Me debuted its own social news service for iPad in April.
Streamglider is now entering that same space with an iPad reader that blends social interest streams with news consumption. The category also carries unresolved tension with publishers — The Times Company's objection to a news-reader app back in June 2010 showed how quickly aggregator-style readers can draw rights objections. With the iPad generating the overwhelming majority of tablet web traffic per October 2011 measurements, it remains the only tablet platform worth launching on first.
First-order effects
- Flipboard and Pulse face another funded challenger in a category they defined, forcing differentiation on curation and design rather than the basic swipe-to-read mechanic.
- Publishers gain one more potential distribution surface for their content — and one more party whose aggregation terms they may have to police, as the Times Company's earlier objections foreshadowed.
Second-order effects
- Crowding among social readers pushes the category toward consolidation or acquisition, since standalone apps compete for the same publisher feeds and the same finite iPad home-screen slots.
- Differentiation pressure shifts value toward whoever owns the social graph feeding the reader — Facebook and Twitter become gatekeepers whose API terms shape every entrant's product.
Third-order effects
- If launch-after-launch continues without a clear second-place winner behind Flipboard, tablet news consumption consolidates around a few platforms — possibly including OS-level offerings — leaving independent readers fighting over the remainder.
- Publisher attitudes toward third-party readers harden into formal licensing norms, replacing ad hoc objections like the Times Company's 2010 complaint with negotiated feed agreements.
The trend: Tablet news reading is consolidating into a platform battle where design-led startups race to define the category before Apple, publishers, or the social networks absorb it.