Nope, not Flipboard or even FlickFootball, my fave iPad app is the RSS reader Pulse which is ever so pretty (thanks to its clever use of thumbnails), is very easy to use and even enables you to create your own Posterous blog of your top stories http://ashleynorris.pulsememe.com/

The main drawback was that you could only have a limited number of sources. Now that number has rocketed to 60 which is enough for me If you have an iPad it is well worth paying £1.99 to own it.

I have just written a story for Shiny Shiny http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2010/08/flipboard_-_has.html asking if iPad owners are still Flipboard. Although I think Flipboard has some very striking visual features for me it just isn't useful enough.

I am not saying that it isn't impressive and I do think it could have an interesting future as a platform for bloggers and indie publishers, http://ashleynorris.posterous.com/could-flipboard-become-a-wordpress-for-the-ip but quite frankly it just isn't useful enough.

Given the choice I would always use a proper Twitter client like Tweet or Tweetdeck to find out what my friends are saying, because as well as reading links (and maybe commenting on them too) I can interact with them and reply, retweet and DM. For me Flipboard is just too much of a sit back experience. Twitter and Facebook are all about getting involved, not just reading.

I also cringe a little when I see people's tweets sitting in isolation in the magazine format. Flipping past images and stories then seeing someone tweeting about transport-related issues or what they are cooking for tea, seems very odd.

I am however getting addicted to Pulse. It is a paid for RSS reader that delivers stories in a very visual way (it basically grabs a thumbnail and the headline) which is perfectly suited to the iPad. The team behind Pulse also added a very cool feature last week that enables the user to create their own link blog using Posterous. Basically each time you like a story it appears on your blog as well as on a dedicated channel on Pulse.

It is such a shame that Flipboard grabbed so much of the spotlight. It might be superficially very impressive and I bet some killer uses for the app are not far away, but for now Pulse is so much more useful.

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Amid all the kerfuffle about Flipboard the other week, the other big new app for the iPad, Pulse, got kind of forgotten. This is a real shame as it is a very neat RSS app that turns your feeds into pics and headlines in an attractive way.

Sure it has its limitatations - you can only have up to 25 feeds - but it works well and is well worth the few quid you pay for it.

Today, in another smart move, Pulse teamed up with Posterous to offer an easy way of creating a blog composed of your favourite articles. You simply like an article in Pulse and it is pinged straight away to your blog

Mine is here http://ashleynorris.pulsememe.com/

The big advantage of Posterous is that you can switch autoposting on so that the posts are automatically pinged on Twitter and Facebook.

There has to be some very clever use for this for both brands and publishers, but I haven't thought of one yet