Staying up-to-date with the news and your favorite blogs can be a daunting task these days. The Web has become pretty fragmented where we need to scroll through multiple sites to see our favorite online magazines and newspapers. So today Google is launching the Google Play Newsstand, a new app for your Android phone or tablet that looks to bring together all of your favorite news sources in one interface.
According to the Google Android blog, the application caters to your specific interests:
Newsstand puts the news you care about most front and center and presents stories that interest you based on your tastes. The more you read the better it will get.”
Using the app you can subscribe to your favorite publication which will get formatted for reading on your particular device to read now or bookmark for later (including offline viewing).
Google Play Newsstand
The Google Play Newsstand currently offers more than 1,900 free and paid full-length publications that you can subscribe to or follow. Some of the best ones include:
- Newspaper Subscriptions: The Australian, The Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, The National Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal
- Magazines: Better Homes & Gardens, The Economist, Esquire, Fast Company, Forbes, Game Informer, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Shape, TIME, Vanity Fair and WIRED
- Blogs: Apartment Therapy, Colossal, Cool Hunting, Flavorpill, Saveur Daily, TMZ and The Verge
- News sites: ABC News, The Atlantic, CBS Sports, CNET, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, The Guardian, NPR, Reuters and The Telegraph
Google Play Magazines will be upgraded to Google Play Newsstand in the next few days and, if you’re a Google Currents user, you can upgrade to the Play Newsstand to have all of your news sources transferred to the new app and be ready for you to read.
Google said it’s looking to create one place to read and discover your favorite content. The trouble is, many of us used to look to Google’s RSS Reader app (which Google discontinued) to do basically the same thing. Reinventing this feature just for mobile devices with a limited number of publications available to subscribe to isn’t anything to get excited about. Even if Google’s new app blows away Flipboard and other similar mobile discovery services, it will be a long time before I would trust Google with my feeds again, if ever!
