Taptu on the iPhone; it's universal for both iPhone and iPad.

Free news aggregator Taptu isn’t just universal in the sense that it comes with native versions for iPad and iPhone. It also aims to be a truly universal aggregator, letting you read your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn streams, plus RSS feeds from Google Reader, Bing RSS, or any thousands of sites around the web. You can even follow curated streams that combine many feeds into one topic.

And it’s all very customizable: you can specify font sizes and colors, and even prune individual news sources from the curated topic streams. Or roll individual feeds into a mega-stream by dropping one on top of another in the Edit menu. When you’re reading articles you can share them on Facebook, Twitter, by email, or save them to your Instapaper account.

But it’s sort of tricky to get used to. We had trouble figuring out how to reorder the streams on the iPad at first—turns out you open the Edit menu, tap and hold one until it flashes, and then you can slide it up or down. The “large” text option didn’t seem very large. Logging in to Twitter and LinkedIn was buggy until we force-quit the app and relaunched it. And the popup that appears on the Edit page didn’t always go away when we closed the Edit page.

Some feeds are a little wonky. When we added Lifehacker (a featured stream), it kept defaulting to the mobile versions of the stories, even on the iPad. That’s not terrible, but several times we clicked on an article and instead got the comments—something we only realized when the language got, uh, colorful. Clicking on View in Browser fixed that.

The bottom line. It’s got potential, but needs a few more updates to work really smoothly. We still prefer Pulse or Reeder, but Taptu is worth a try, especially since it’s free.