Google Currents is an online reader of aggregated content for popular and personal sources.
The core of Google Currents is to take online feeds and content from different creators and present it in a magazine style for easy visual consumption and digestion.
Google Currents syncs content from various sources and transforms each story into small hubs. Clicking into each hub imports the story so it can be read along with supplying a link to the original article.
Google Currents’ layout performs well in both portrait and landscape modes, but some articles scale better in one particular mode. One strange quirk of Google Currents is that is decides which content to show with or without images on imported content. Sites that are not optimized for readers appear incomplete, but the application still creates a strong presentation of content.
There are different “editions” of content like publisher editions, Google trending editions, and blogs/feeds. Each feed has the tendency to sync with Google Currents differently.
Searching through a Facebook feed is much different than a blog. If Google Currents cannot sync the content quickly, it attempts to import the information with the next sync.
Google Currents supports offline reading and different sharing options. It is a well featured app with easy options to add or delete feeds, search through different categories for subscriptions, and Google search for specific blogs; but it does feel like some improvements are required to streamline the application.
Google Currents is a simple, comprehensive magazine style reader, but requires a lot of initial customization.
