Flud was a social news reader application for

iPad The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating s ...

, iPhone, Android and

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design la ...

. It was designed to display RSS feeds from blogs and news sites into individual streams for easy viewing. In Flud, articles and stories could be stored for later reading with the Reading List, shared as a favorite read with the Flud button, and shared with

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, email,

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...

Instapaper Instapaper is a social bookmarking service that allows web content to be saved so it can be "read later" on a different device, such as an e-reader, smartphone, or tablet. The service was founded in 2008 by Marco Arment. In April 2013, Arment ...

, and ReadItLater. Flud was headquartered in the historic

Spreckels Theater Building Spreckels Theatre is a performing arts center located in San Diego, California. It was touted as "the first modern commercial playhouse west of the Mississippi". It was designed for philanthropist John D. Spreckels, and was meant to commemorate th ...

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California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, with remote offices in

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at th ...

and

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

. Flud had been tagged as "the first true social news reader" where users could create a personal profile, follow others who share their interests, and become influencers to their followers by sharing content (known as Fluding). On August 8, 2013, Flud was discontinued.

Features

* Create a profil

to display profile image, username, followers, following, most read sources, number of Fluded and Reading List articles. * Activity Fee

shows what a user's followers are reading and fluding. * Add, reorder, edit category, or remove feeds. * Pre-loaded featured feeds for adding and browsing. * Connect to other user

with similar interests in news, blogs and topics. * Flu

favorite articles. * Most Fluded feed displays the articles most fluded by users. * Connect to Tumblr, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, Read It Later, Instapaper and email. * Create a Reading List of interesting headlines. * Access to Reading List when offline. * Play video, view images, read stories. * Account preferences transfer across devices.

History

Flud started as
secret sauce
project in the summer of 2010 betwee
Bobby Ghoshal
an
Matthew Ausonio
cofounders of Made By Rabbit, Inc., a startup out of

, California. Flud 1.0 for the

hit the

iOS App Store The App Store is an app store platform, developed and maintained by Apple Inc., for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS Software Deve ...

in August 2010 and was made available for the iPhone in the following months. Soon after the initial launch of Flud 1.0,

Fast Company ''Fast Company'' is a monthly American business magazine published in print and online that focuses on technology, business, and design. It publishes six print issues per year. History ''Fast Company'' was launched in November 1995 by Alan Web ...

distinguished Flud's iPad user interface as the "Best UI Design of 2010", NBC called Flud the “future of news” and Mashable distinguished Flud as 1 of 3 news readers actively changing and innovating the news industry. Flud received $1 million in seed funding in April 2011 and became available on Android mobile devices in August 2011. In December 2011, Flud 2.
hit the App Store
as a new type of social news reader, allowing users to create their ow
news personalities
and become a trusted source on topical interests. Major changes included the addition o
social features
an updated

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

design, and

support. Flud 2.0 launched on

and Android devices in March 2012. On August 8, 2013, the Flud service was discontinued. Users had until that date to download all their data.

References

{{Aggregators 2010 software Android (operating system) software IOS software