The shakeup that's happened in the world of RSS feed readers since the demise of Google Reader has led a lot of people to reconsider where and how do they really want to read. Those who adopted RSS reading strategies in the early days might stick to their tradition of trolling feeds on a computer or laptop, but with RSS mobile apps galore, including the Digg iPad app (free), there's no need to feel restricted to full-sized screens. Digg's iPad app has a main page that's similar to the Digg site, wherein a popular vote helps surface interesting news stories and other Web content, but it now also includes the brand-new and highly customizable RSS feed reader Digg Reader (technically in beta).

While technically still in beta, Digg Reader shows a lot of early promise, and it looks fantastic on the iPad. The reader itself has a few limitations—you have to have a Google account, for example, and it doesn't support OPML uploads—but it's off to a decent start and is one of the better options for simple RSS feed aggregation on an iPad.

How to Get Digg Reader on iPad

When you install the free Digg app from iTunes and launch it, tap the three horizontal lines in the upper left corner to open Digg Reader. You'll have to sign into a Google account to use Digg Reader. The app will request access to information from your Google account—a show-stopping privacy concern for some people—and you have to grant it access to use the RSS feed reader.

Digg then pulls in your Google Reader feeds and imports them pretty well, preserving folder organization in the process.

In testing the Digg app and the included Digg Reader, Google Alerts did not actually work, appearing as empty feeds, even when I could see in other RSS services and my Google Alerts via email that the feed was active and updating.

Digg App Features and Design

The main part of the Digg iPad app doesn't contain much to write home about. In fact, it's very much downplayed the moment you start a Digg Reader account. In short, there's a home screen where popular Digg news stories display in a scrollable view. Stories appear with a headline and image, and a count showing how many "Diggs" (essentially "likes") a story received. You can open the story to read it in full dispaly, or use a row of icons at the top to bookmark the story to read later, or share it via email, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth.

Digg Reader on the iPad app looks like most other RSS feed readers in the browser, except with more moving parts, like a left rail that hides when you click to read your feeds. That left rail contains a list of your feeds and folders, as expected, with a few essential tools and features at the top, including an icon to let you access "saved" stories.

Click a feed or folder from the left panel, and it opens the list of items in that feed in the main window, hiding the RSS feed reading panel in the process. The display looks great, but you can't toggle between expanded versus minimal previews. Each entry has a headline in bold type with the name of the publication or blog below it, an image when available, and a time stamp showing how long ago the item appeared in your feed (e.g., "4h" indicates four hours ago). Often you'll see one to two lines of preview text from the post if it fits; when images are included, that preview text generally doesn't fit. Tap a post once, and it opens for further reading, which sometimes contains the complete text and other times only another preview. Tap again and you can open the full post in Digg's included browser.