Without doubt, the best answer to the question, "What do you do with your iPad?" is, "Read." Sailing and strolling through any kind of text or imagery on this glassy slab is just so tasty. Yeah, I'm gonna say it: I like it more than most books or magazines, and way way more than newspapers.

Conventional web surfing, however, is not how you ski this shiny mountain. (Mixed that metaphor like a dirty martini!) The Amazon Kindle app certainly starts you down the slope, but fantastic RSS readers such as Reeder and newer approaches like Flipboard and Feedly put you in fluffy powder all the way down to the lodge. (Can you tell I've never skied in my life?) I highly recommend you give each of those apps a try.

But News360 is something different: it's a web site that uses fancy math, à la Google, to gather the important news of the moment, from any legitimate source, and bunch them by general and specific topic headers. So, when I click on one article from the New York Times, about Google buying a chunk of Motorola, I see related articles from CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Mashable, and so on. At first I see a large snippet of each article, but in just a couple of swipes, I'm reading the entire article on the source's web site (ads and all, thus fending off the sort of ambivalence engendered by Flipboard).

The News360 iPhone and iPad apps are truly fantastic. TUAW's complete rundown of the apps turned me onto the site in the first place. I just want to highlight a couple of cool alternative views News360 presents of the news. "360° view" lets you swim through a sea of photos, each representing an article and thus a whole topic. And my favorite mode, the timeline view, constructs a tappable chronology of the subject at hand. None of this appears to be curated at all, but totally automatic, based on the trending-ness of topics.

After I got done with my initial amazement and kvelling over the apps, I went over to the web site to find out what scary geniuses were responsible. At which point, I had my final surprise: the News360 web site is as impressive as the apps. This is one of the few sites I can think of that doesn't relegate its best features to an app you have to download; it works just as smoothly on the web, and all without Flash.

All of this, by the way, is free. You just gotta try it.

News360 for iPad News360 Category: News Updated: Aug 11, 2011 28 Ratings