Flipboard

While the interwebs is still buzzing about the new “social magazine” iPad app Flipboard, I thought I’d add my two cents to the fray. Despite some of the challenges (see “some obvious CONS” below), there are a number of brilliant things happening with the app that I hope inspires others moving forward.

Preloaded Headlines and Summary from my Twitter and Facebook Networks.

Ironically, this is the current buzz around the web: is Flipboard scraping content illegally? Wherever this legal mumbo-jumbo falls, I do hope there’s a solution. It’s just brilliant. My wife commented yesterday on how she would use Twitter if the feed were displayed this way. Otherwise, the stream is just daunting. This magazine-like layout for my Twitter and Facebook stream is a significantly much easier and elegant solution. Power this functionality with Semantic Data and this magazine-like browsing experience will be remarkable.

Visual Mode to Content
The main page is an auto-rotate through the current feed’s set of photos/images. As a 4th screen (yes, I have 3 screen in my work space), I would use this visual mode as a picture frame into the day’s rotating news/buzz stream. Great idea. Obviously, the images are a bit random and I would love a way to determine the visual feed.

Social Network Integration
I can retweet, like and comment right in the app. Is there a reason to go to the website at this point? I’m sure Zuckerberg isn’t very happy about that.

Creative Grids
On pages where a gallery of images are present, Flipboard will automatically devote a grid of photos to the entire page. Smart.

There are some obvious CONS to the app:

Being a week out, it is a bit buggy.
I wish Twitter list actually work cause that would be great channels. And I wouldn’t feel so bad about how much effort I put into my relatively useless Twitter lists.
Content isn’t cached. So no subway reading.
The seemingly random selection for photos as well as their crops could stir an issue for visual purist.

And as the app evolves, I’d love to see: