With nothing really interesting to blog about regarding football or fantasy football lately my interests have been turned to other sports such as Hockey. All I can say is thank god for Hockey and the Caps!
I have also been tracking, as I always do, stocks and financial news. There is almost always something news worthy going on there.
Traditionally, the way I keep up to date with events, news and alerts is via googles reader. It is a good way to funnel different sources into on feed, but it can get cumbersome.
So, with this in mind, I’ve started looking for alternatives. I have also been playing around with a new toy lately. You see I got a new ‘smart phone’ as in a Droid 2 Global edition. I really like this phone and have started exploring a whole new world of mobile apps.
I have some of the standard ESPN and MSN Money type apps which are good but I was and am in search of something more.
I combined my efforts into one with a goal of finding the perfect app for my smart phone that would keep me up-to-date with my latest feeds and find new and upcoming news events and stories.
Allas, there is no perfect app. But what I did find was some really interesting attempts and pages along the way.
Most notable are Pulse, Guzzle.it and paper.li
Pulse is a Flipboard type of app, yes Flipboard is really cool too but It is not for Android. It pulls from a whole host of services as well as social media sites including facebook. You can add custom pages for specific topics and keeps things pretty well organized and interesting to look at.
Guzzle.it is a really cool reader for the web which you can search for related posts, articles and such based on your interests. I really like the web page but, like flipboard, they only have an iphone app.
It came up with this interesting breaking story from Canada about an engineering team which was disqualified from a competition due to improper and unauthorized use of university space and resources by posting a pic of a female engineer wearing a bikini and posing with her teams entry. I understand the unauthorized use of resources angle but improper? Really? How many of us guys wish some of our fellow engineers looked like her? Come on Guzzle Guys, get with the android revolution! Please! IT would be so cool to see this stuff on my Droid.
Paper.li is not an app but a totally awesome data mining web page and reader of Facebook and twitter.
What sets this site apart from all the rest is that it displays all this wonderful information in a newspaper style format. And, you can also create your own newspaper feed too! .
So, there you have it. Some really cool alternatives to you drab bookmarks and news readers as well as an app or two for your smart mobile devices.
If you happen to know of any others that I missed or have a particular favorite, I’d like to hear about them as well.
