Yahoo Livestand App for iPad

Yahoo just released Livestand for iPads a news service/magazine app. (Although they announced the app in February!) The news is combined with photos and videos displayed in a way that does look good on the ole’ iPad.
Livestand is a bit similar to Zite, Evri and Flipboard or Apple’s own Newsstand. At the app’s release Blake Irving, Yahoo’s chief product officer, told reporters at the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale that Livestand is a re-imagining of what Yahoo can be.

You can of course personalize the content from tech news to celeb news, weather and stocks and share articles on Facebook. (Which of course means advertisers can target you!) Well, at least if there are more people using your iPad you can create four separate unique accounts.

So where does Yahoo Livestand get its content? From Yahoo sites naturally, but they also pull content from other web sites. You can get info from a lot of other publications like ABC News, Consumer Reports, Forbes or Parenting magazine as well as a bunch of sports and hobby magazine like Surfer and Bike. There’s even talk of publishers selling subscriptions for full magazines but that doesn’t look like it’s going to come to fruition until next year.

While the design is kind of cool, there are drawbacks. Livestand doesn’t work in portrait mode and the sort of 3D effect can obscure your choices and basically adds another step between you and content you’d like to access.

Also, there seems to be some confusion when you add topics to Livestand. Sometimes a topic gets added to “My Library”, other times to “Personal Mix”. You would think rather broad topics would be added to “My Library” and then more specific themes would be placed in “Personal Mix” but how that’s decided isn’t clear.

Well, at least all the content on Livestand and the app itself is available for free. Even with its problem, it could be worth checking out. After all, what in life is ever perfect? 😉

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Originally posted 2011-11-11 21:05:38.