iPad Flipboard App Review (at Appolicious)

Flipboard centralizes access to your social world, and organizes it into a slick format that makes staying up to date and in the know much more visually appealing and fun. A must-download, free of charge.

(Side Note: Yes, Virginia, I was working at a .com start up back in 1994 ;) -- Classroom Connect -- helping schools move from Gopher (and Telnet and FTP) to Mozilla/the first Web browsers. This app gives me the same feeling -- moving from reading long lists of Tweets at twitter.com and updates on Facebook to seeing those same tweets/updates/photo text hyperlinks turned into a magazine format with auto-rendering of images and destination copy from each link. A once every 10 year feeling, this time taking place on Apple's iPad.)

What is Flipboard?

When it comes to consuming content, the iPad excels.

Until Flipboard, we were content to head to Safari or Atomic Web to browse FaceBook. Or reading row after row of Tweets via twitter.com (or TweetDeck), with each content link leading to... who knows what. Not to mention the myriad RSS, blog, and news readers to mine for up-to-date posts, news content, and more.

Now we have Flipboard, and it's a treat.

This free app organizes your personal FaceBook feed and Twitter streams and lists, along with hand-picked channel content and feeds from Flipboard staff, into a slick digital magazine application.

Once set up, Flipboard will be your go-to app to browse a stylized selection of your personalized social media/news sources. Swipe left and right to turn your personalized "pages" of your very own digital magazine filled only with content you wish to display.

The genius of the app is its ability to take mundane Twitter/update posts and transform them into visuals that are a treat for the eye. If a link is embedded in an update, you'll see a small preview of part of the page right in the app. Genius. No more plain bit.ly/short URLs making you wonder what's on the other end. Same with new photos shared to you.

In essence, the app thoughtfully (with a print magazine designers eye) extracts both the text and images found in destination links or friend's Facebook posts, and renders them into a modern print magazine format, complete with headlines, bylines, images, and a first set of text as appropriate. Photos are also tastefully presented in several ways, integrating updates seamlessly into your digital magazine.



Flipboard also also guides you to hand-picked Twitter lists and staff picked streams of content, along with your own Twitter lists if you've set them up (which group tweets by subject area.) Finally, an app that makes Twitter lists much easier to find, collect, and browse in a meaningful way.

Organize your followers into lists by subject area, then add those lists/subjects to one of your Flipboard slots. You've instantly made a near real-time digital magazine containing the very latest updates, articles, links, and more.

The biggest surprise? Photos shared by your followers or friends are easily browsed through the app, and a small set of these images will auto-rotate into the start up screen of the application. Don't be surprised if you see your friend's vacation photos or your new niece/nephew pop up on your cover. (I was!)

Flipboard Downsides?

As of this writing (the first week of release), the app is limited in several ways.

1. As far as I can tell, what's presented is not your full FaceBook or Twitter feeds. It's a selection of 'recent' content, and not a full grab of the latest items. This of it like this -- you could sit and read the AP news and photos feeds in their entirety; every single story/update, thousands every day, all day long. Flipboard takes your firehose-like feeds and hand-picks and displays only a a selection of items, much like a newspaper or magazine editor making editorial decisions in picking items from news feeds.

2. Only nine unique sections of content can be displayed at one time.

3. To refresh the items displayed, you'll need to quit/restart the app. There's no "update" button per se. Sometimes quitting and relaunching the app two times, with a short pause between each, nets the best refresh.

4. The app does a better job of collecting and displaying Twitter items. FaceBook updates are less frequent or deep going back in time more than a day.

5. You can't update your Twitter or Facebook feeds from within the app. It's read-only for now.

6. You'll need to be tethered to the Net to make Flipboard work. Content isn't cached for viewing if you go offline/leave your wifi or AT&T connection(s).

7. Doing a keyword search when adding new content items nets Twitter list results, but adding them to a content space isn't currently working. Also creating and adding your own Twitter lists isn't functioning as of launch week.

I'm betting all of this will be fixed in the next few weeks and months with updates, with special content areas made available from many other sources automatically.

On a personal note, I'll be happy when our friends at Digg deliver Flipboard-ready feeds for their main content areas. Digg accessible via a digital magazine-like format, with all the images and stories displayed with this ground breaking reformatting app? Amazing.