Enjoy your news and social media feeds in a new way
persona/ is a reader that takes your news and social media feeds and presents them in an elegant, magazine-style viewer.
What is persona/?
The idea of persona/ is similar to that of the popular iOS news reader, Flipboard. The application centralizes your RSS feeds and social media networks, so you can check all that is relevant to you from one single interface.
persona/ contains support for a range of different services. Integration with Twitter, Facebook and RSS is available out of the box. Then, if you’d like to add more services like Google Reader, Tumblr and Instagram, you can do so by making a one-off payment per service.
How does it look?
Once you’ve configured and logged into your various accounts, persona/ takes your feeds and weaves them into a smart, mag-style design. Stories from your news and social media feeds are displayed in this format. Click on one to open it and read more, from within the persona/ interface.
You can share stories very easily on Twitter or Facebook by clicking the Share button in the bottom-right corner. There are also buttons for liking, commenting, retweeting and other actions, depending on the context.
Although persona/ looks nice, the presentation of content isn’t as gorgeous as it is in Flipboard. Images displayed by persona/ are sometimes of poor quality, and occasionally the picture isn’t centered properly so you can’t see what’s going on. Testing on an iPad 2, we also experienced some problems loading video within persona/ and would have to launch the video externally through YouTube instead.
Overall, persona/ makes for a pleasant way to get all of your favorite news and social media content in one place. If the graphic design is improved, it could mount a challenge as rival to Flipboard.
