Mfarhanonline Social Media News: Online document hosting service Scribd launched an iPhone app Tuesday that aims to make reading on small smartphone screens bearable. “For the most part, browsers were built for computers and sort of retrofitted for cellphones,” says Scribd Director of Product Matt Riley, “and they really haven’t provided a great reading experience so far.” To — for lack of better words — “smartphonize” reading, Riley and his team built Float , an app that strips the external links, ads and any clutter from an article to make it easier to read on a small screen. When reading an article on Float, users have a choice between scrolling up and down or swiping right to left in order to see the next page of content. If they pinch the screen to zoom in, the text rewraps. The app’s easy reading format is useful and improves the reading experience. But it makes less than a bold headline. What is really nifty about Scribd’s new app are the four ways that content gets loaded onto it. The app links to your Scribd account and downloads any documents in it for offline mobile reading. But it also links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts and searches for links that friends have posted on those platforms and loads such articles into a “social feed” for offline reading. Readers can also browse for articles from more than 150 publications directly from the app. (Disclosure: Mfarhanonline is one of them.) Scribd had the foresight to partner with these publications instead of merely scraping their content in order to avoid a Zite-style legal fiasco . Scribd also joined Apple in borrowing a trick from online reading tool Instapaper . With a browser bookmarklet, you can easily send articles you find online to your account for reading later. For now Float is completely free, but Riley sa! ys event ually Scribd might charge for premium content or show ads on certain pages. Paid or not, it’s not a particular surprise that Scribd is aggressively pursuing a mobile audience. The company launched a send-to-device feature last year and CEO Trip Adler mentioned mobile strategy when he announced a $13 million round of funding in January. "As the world rapidly changes the way it reads,” he said in a statement at the time, “we are rapidly preparing to change the way we deliver what they read.” More About: Instapaper , iphone , scribd , smartphone reader , startups For more Mobile coverage: Follow Mfarhanonline Mobile on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Mobile channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad Social Media reviews series maintain by Mayya
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