Flipboard - This is an interesting concept, but I feel it's like it's a somewhat limiting format. It's fun to flip through headlines and content, but, at least on my iPhone, I have no desire to actually open and thoughtfully pore over the "long reads" and in-depth analysis from some of my personal favorite content providers like the Atlantic, Bitch Media, Jezebel, Mother Jones, the Representation Project, Wonkette, xoJane, and many others that provide commentary, journalism, and or satire that I prefer to read (and respond to) on my laptop, so Flipboard seems to me to be a superficial way of keeping up. Perhaps I would feel differently about this if I had been using a larger tablet device.
Zite - From what I have seen and experienced, I like this app. However, my little iPhone 4 doesn't seem to process the app so well. It doesn't exactly freeze up so much as go into a perpetual waiting state each time I add an interest. The front page looks a little bit like a blog or a traditional newspaper, and I appreciate the non-gimmicky format for scrolling through titles. (Interesting bit of cynical librarian humor, the first headline on my personal feed as of Thursday, February 13, 2014, 8:40 a.m. CST, is Four More Reasons to Be Skeptical of Open-Access Publishing, copyright 2014 Elsevier -- hahahaha (Also, please note that my views do not reflect the views of my employer, my colleagues, or my profession as a whole.)). I'm still not prone to check out long reads on my iPhone. I'd rather make a note of the headline and bring it up on my laptop or desktop and read it on a larger screen. Still, I am finding some really great inspiring library stuff and other amusement.
The "keeping up" apps are probably great for people with tablets or people comfortable reading on phone and tablet screens, but I feel it's a superficial way of getting the news for me. Flipping through article headlines to get news is sort of like reading the scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen on those 24/7/365 news/"news" channels.
