Yahoo! announces Livestand for iPad, available first half 2011
If you've been following TUAW's reports about The Daily, you're aware that many of the TUAW bloggers are so fed up with the buggy, crashing newspaper app that they've removed it from their iPads while the app is still free. For me, the crashes and slow loading weren't as much of an irritant as the lack of customizable and local content. I just don't want to pay for horoscopes, fashion news and entertainment gossip that I can't turn off, and the fact that I can't read any local news on the app killed it for me.
Yahoo! has apparently been listening, as the struggling internet giant has announced -- but hasn't shipped -- its solution to the problem that is The Daily. It has announced Livestand for iPad, a customizable news app that will be available "in the first half of 2011." There's no word on whether Yahoo! plans to offer the app for free or, as in the case of The Daily, it will be using subscriptions to refill its coffers.
Yahoo! wants to capitalize on the huge volume of content that it has available from multiple publishers, the billions of photos available from Flickr and the many advertising agreements it already has in place. The company says that Livestand will be a digital newsstand that is "continuously programmed by a person's interests and contexts."
Some of the screenshots (obviously mockups since the app isn't yet available) show local content boxes with top stories, weather and more, all wrapped in a very visual package that is reminiscent of the Flipboard content page. That makes me wonder if it might not just be a better, and more timely, solution to just load Flipboard with RSS feeds of local news from Yahoo! That solution would also make it less likely for me to have to put up with ads that are "data-rich, actionable, even location aware."
I'll let you know how my Yahoo! feeds + Flipboard = Local Newspaper experiment works. Perhaps I'll get my own version of Livestand for iPad well before July rolls around.
[via MacStories]
