It used to be that the term “aggregator” was generally used for on-line services such as Google News that pulled together articles from a variety of sources to provide a web-based news summary more inclusive than any one source alone. Then Flipboard came along, showing a completely different way of gathering and displaying news on tablets.

Needless to say, when something new and original comes along, the rest of the world immediately tries to copy and improve upon it. So now PaidContent has a comparison chart of Flipboard and eight other news aggregation apps: Pulse, Zite, SkyGrid, Editions, and more. Some of these apps, such as Flipboard, trawl social networks for sources; others use more official news sources and content partners. Some simply present the most popular stories; others try to guess based on user preferences what users are likely to want to see.

It’s still relatively early in the aggregator app market, of course, so it remains to be seen which if these will have the staying power necessary to stick around. Consumers can only use so many aggregators at once, after all.

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