Flipboard Launches World's First Social Magazine

[Maura]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2vpvEDS00o"]YouTube - Meet Flipboard.[/ame]

Flipboard is a new social magazine iPad app that aims to bring to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. The magazine app is the brainchild of Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple, and has been designed from the ground up for iPad. It works by creating a magazine out of the user's social content, with the Facebook and Twitter sections enabling readers to quickly fllip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, so readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link. Instead, they instantly see all the stories, comments and images.

As you can see in the video, Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. What I like about this is that it's useful for those people who might not have Twitter themselves, but who like to follow other people's or organisations' updates on Twitter. You can choose from Flipboard's suggested selections on topics such as Sports, News, Tech and Style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds, or create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter list to make Flipboard even more personal.

“With over 1 billion messages posted every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date. We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”
Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO.

Flipboard is available now from the iPad app store as a free download.
Source: Flipboard

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[Rlanger]

Just installed it. Looks like a really beautiful and useful app. Best of all, it's free!

 

[Hasty]

Looks pretty but I want more boxes to assign.

 

[Scala]

Wow! And free?! Double WOW!

 

[Gayle]

Love it!!

 

[BFP_br]

Cool, great app.

 

[arshield]

Looks cool but I keep getting a servers busy error

 

[tdmsu]

It is cool, but the Facebook does not update often, and does not include all updates, only a few for some reason.

They keep adding feeds, but I would also like to have more than 9 available at a time. Why make us manually delete read feeds? Why not set it up so that the ones we've read disappear, leaving the rest?

 

[Prasius]

Agreed about limited feeds; my review on the app store says this as well. Hopefully they can work something out soon.

 

[Hasty]

I've been using this app since it came out and do so want it to succeed but I keep finding myself frustrated by it.

World news is appallingly bad. Repetitive illustrations and irrelevant boxes with irrelevant quotes. The limited feeds are already noted. There's a lot of potential here if they can sharpen it up.

Still it is free and remarkable free from ads so far.
It's also introduced me to a website I was unaware of, The Browser. For that alone I'm grateful.

 

[arshield]

I think it is a pretty app and I like the way it handles information. But it is not good for showing you all the information. So I don't like it as my only twitter/facebook app. I can monitor twitter (I usually ignore facebook anyway) and then at the end of the day flip through. I usually find something that I missed.

 

[drwinston001]

this app shows the potential of the iPad. Whether that potential is realised with flipboard is another matter.

I had to wait about a week before I could integrate my twitter and facebook feeds and as of about 10 minutes ago my facebook feed has never actually worked.

It's good for a free app though without doubt. I enjoy reading random news that I would never have come across. If I could add one thing it would be location. I enjoy all sorts of sports but the sports section only refers on a regular basis to American sports. That's all fine but baseball is a girls sport played by men so I'm not interested In all seriousness, as football (soccer) is my main passion it doesn't touch on that enough as it's American based. This and other American bias towards stories will mean it probably won't be as successful as it could be throughout the world except America, unless they can use location