Killer Apps and Cool Gadgets: Take HuffPost With You Wherever You Go

In June, I wrote about the very cool gadget that our tech team created to allow iGoogle users to keep up with the Huffington Post at a glance -- and without having to leave their iGoogle page.

I really love how you can flip through all of our content areas quickly, getting the top news of the moment -- delivered with the signature HuffPost attitude and style. It's a lot more than just a feed of our top stories - it's interactive, it's visually compelling, and it's constantly refreshing.

Here's a taste of what the gadget gives you:

Our goal is to make it possible for you to take HuffPost with you wherever you go -- whether it's via our amazing iPhone app, our new BlackBerry/mobile site, the app we are developing for Android, or the iGoogle gadget -- which, thanks to a host of new features Google just launched, has become a lot more interactive and social.

Earlier this week, I talked about how social news is going to be the next step in the evolution of news -- and how much more engaged we are when we share the news experience with friends. That's why we launched HuffPost Social News, our digital water cooler -- making it easy to connect with your friends over the news, and to dig deeper into the stories you like best.

For those of you who spend a lot of time on iGoogle, the updated HuffPost gadget offers some of the same social experiences. You can now share stories with your friends and keep up with what your friends are up to online.

And don't worry if you're an iGoogle addict and also signed up for HuffPost Social News -- we'll be integrating Google's social tools into HuffPost Social News soon.

You can add the HuffPost gadget to your iGoogle page here. You can get the iPhone app here, and the BlackBerry app here.

And, if you want, you can add any or all of the gadgets on my personal iGoogle home page (or the home pages of Dave Matthews, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Rania, Al Gore, and Rachael Ray, among others) to your iGoogle home page here.

Let us know what you think. We love getting your feedback.

Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff

Comments

[swkidder]

11:37 AM on 08/23/2009

And the alternative view ... I found the little "flash" window incredibly irritating. I like to have a page in front of me, from which I can select the articles that interest me and read them in their order of relative importance. So the issue of this style of presentation really doesn't work for me.
And, perhaps more important, we're all jumping thoughtlessly into a 24/7 always wired style of living in which we have stopped thinking in favor of just reacting. Human beings were not wired to live in "Internet time," but rather in something between that and the time scale in which plants grow. One of the things that contributes to the current level of emotionality and irrational rage in this country is the extent to which we've stopped talking to one another around our kitchen tables in service of spending more time in front of our televisions listening to Fox.
And the same is also true on the left, whether we recognize that or not. There are gifts in what our technology can do for us, but we need to stop and think a little about what those are - and aren't - before we open our mouths like baby birds and swallow reflexively. All this electronic chatter is very whippy and trendy and seductive ... and "No, thank you." I prefer to engage with electronic media at my volition, and not have it shoved at me.

[Yousif Al-Jakh]

01:11 AM on 08/23/2009

nice work.. any chance of getting those flash links to work on HTML5 ?

[cinemabon]

08:30 PM on 08/22/2009

I watched you on Charlie Rose. I thought you articulated your position well. I would not assert Obama has reached a crisis state either, and, like you, I believe he has time to repair any damage the Republicans tried to inflict over the last month. However, listening to the New York Times reporter, I thought he painted a pessimistic picture. Please stay hopeful.

[alwaysthere]

05:05 PM on 08/22/2009

TO ALL OF US WHO EVER DREAMED BIG TIME
ABOUT A NITE WITH ARRIANNA

WET DREAMS BELONG TO GOD

[Mktgpro]

05:01 PM on 08/22/2009

Yet another excellent communication addon. It's welcome..

[Angie Cordeiro]

04:28 PM on 08/22/2009

I'm signed up and loving it!

[rmreddicks]

03:19 PM on 08/22/2009

Do the mods come with us? No thanks.

[cordyc]

02:37 PM on 08/22/2009

Enough with all the gadgets. I don't like facebook and will not use it.

I suddenly found myself signed up by a group from Africa. They must have downloaded a friends address book! She was the only name I recognized. No privacy invading facebook for me.

I also am trying to figure out how to get rid of Yahoo/Digg. I went to Digg an article and found my physical home address entered in! How did they get that?

Enough is enough. No social networking for me until my privacy is assured.

[Deninor]

02:09 PM on 08/22/2009

The current presdent is a celebrity and a community organizer not a leader. He is promulgating more myths about the so-called health care plan than anyone. As people learn more about the plan (as more and more reliable commentaries and analyses arise) the less likely it is to pass. He should have just rammed it through as he intended to. Don't give the commoners a chance to read it, understand it and challenge it. Just tell them he knows that a one-size-fits-all Soviet-style health plan will bring them happiness and we should all learn to live with it. Why complicate things with knowledge, examples of prior failures, threats of increased taxation (the rich will soon become the poor), limited services, longer waits, curtailment of drug development, shortages of medical professionals, etc. Deninor

[BillDaCatt]

12:56 PM on 08/22/2009

I disagree with your decision to further encourage social networking at The Huffington Post. Social networking has been the primary reason that the "Tea Bagger", "Birther", and "Deather" arguments are so well known. Communication on social networks, rather than being part of the solution, are part of the problem because they permit hearsay and hyperbole to be injected directly into the mainstream dialog, displacing news and informative commentary with discussions from the lunatic fringe. Allowing anyone and everyone the ability to weigh in on a topic dilutes the purpose of news and renders the integrity of journalism worthless.

While it's true that Barack Obama was elected largely because of the strength and usefulness of social networks, he capitalized on the negative emotions many of us had for our former president rather than the positive ones we held for Obama. Hope and Change were the rallying cries he won on, but they were fueled by the dissatisfaction and distrust we had for McCain, the GOP, and the previous administration. Hardly a winning strategy for a news organization that wishes to be informative while retaining some modicum of neutrality.

I don't know what the vaccine for the illness that news currently suffers from will be, but I am sure that social networking is not part of it.

[FrankKalder]

04:11 AM on 08/22/2009

Great communication facilities (interactive technology; link management; etc)! :) Pertinently, this http://bit.ly/FY2s9 may be of interest.

While I've signed up at HuffPost Social News already, I'm not (yet) using iGoogle, though.

[sheilaofmiami]

01:27 PM on 08/21/2009

Arianna, I am watching Charlie Rose. You are so very right, Obama needs to stop being a pied piper, you got it right.

But what is needed is what Doris Kearns Goodwin said, that the cost of health care needs addressing before we consider new health care.

Obama needs to "man up" and lead us by way of leadership. He needs to stop trying to cajole us, and start telling us what is for our best interest.

And we are not YET in a real depression. I don't see the economy really improving any time soon. Health care costs must be corrected, so that people like my mother, g-d rest her soul, can afford the life saving care, and those with no job can get some help staying healthy.

[Vicks123]

01:04 PM on 08/21/2009

Here's a suggestion,

The sites "fully moderated" commentary makes it impossible to have a discussion since it takes minutes or longer to get a comment up - especially on more heavily traveled posts.

I'm kind of new here, but maybe it would be better if you just had mods ban people who had been flagged by other users ...

Thanks

[Rubberlegs]

11:52 AM on 08/21/2009

Hi Arianna,

This blog is not about apps or google. I just heard on Fox News that there is a march in favor of Health Care reform on Sept 13th in response to the tea bagger march on Sept 12th. Robert Reisch has called for this to show support for change. Please highlight this in HuffingtonPost.

Regards and Kudos on the good work.

[potrerohillman]

11:44 AM on 08/21/2009

sad, truly sad. there is a hubris that is never ending. huffpost, no matter how informative, is not a lifestyle or cult. the 24/7 huffpost indicates a life dedicated to self-absorbed self-referential irrelevance, like the inane twitter postings that add nothing but merely serve as the cyber equivalent of self reflecting mirrors were the infinitely duplicated images merely get smaller and smaller. turn your gadgets off, spend some time meditating, climbing a mountain or sailing. cook a good meal from friends, write a poem, weed in the garden or even donate the money which you would spend on the latest gadget to your favorite charity, which probably could use the donation in these hard times.