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Flipboard - the personal iPad magazine the web just fell in love with
I've never seen as much buzz about an iPad app as I've seen about Flipboard this morning. The word has been flying around Twitter like crazy, but what IS Flipboard? As an introductory video starring Adam "lonelysandwich" Lisagor explains, it's a constantly-updating iPad magazine based on the links your friends share. It's also free, which is a nice perk.
Flipboard plugs into Facebook and Twitter to figure out what you might be interested in seeing -- articles, photo albums, videos -- and updates dynamically to show you those things. It's a natural fit for the iPad, and the interface looks to be both beautiful and functional. Of course, the "social magazine" concept wouldn't be complete if you couldn't share things on your networks via Flipboard, so it also lets you post (it looks similar to Tumblr's "reblog" feature) and Facebook Like things.
Is Flipboard as amazing as it looks, or is the hype unjustified? I don't have an iPad (anybody want to send me one?), so I'd love to hear some comments from our readers who have actually tried it. One caveat: I've seen a lot of reports that Flipboard is having trouble keeping up with its instant popularity, so you might have trouble connecting your social accounts at first.
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsThomas HoustonJul 21st 2010 2:37PM
really needs twitter list support..
PrimitiveWallflowerJul 21st 2010 2:54PM
Just downloaded it. Extremely slick and a lot of potential. It needs the ability to add RSS feeds or to sync with Google Reader.
TomJul 21st 2010 2:59PM
Bit overrated. The animations are fantastic, the flips are great, but you can only read content from their pre-curated lists, you can't import any RSS site.
No integration with Google Reader, which is a problem.
Finally you can't read the whole articles anyway, it only shows an excerpt. You can click to make it larger, but the article caps at a certain word count and it has a button to read the full article on the web. That's where you lose the elegance. Nice animations, flips and zooms, but as soon as you want to read paragraph 3 you have to click out to read the full article on the web page.
If you could merge this with the Reeder app I think you'd have something.
PrimitiveWallflowerJul 21st 2010 3:26PM
Yes, Flipboard + Reeder would be killer. There just isn't enough content from a Twitter feed -- kind of by definition -- to merit a magazine layout, and while my Facebook friends sometimes post interesting articles Facebook is not what I think of as my "go to" place for longer-form reading material.
ChrisDuToitJul 21st 2010 3:35PM
So far I'm very pleased with the app. It is almost as if the actual webpage preloads in the background, so viewing only a part of the article is no hassle for me. The ability to post interesting articles to Instapaper also helps.
I do however agree that Google Reader intergration would be awesome, as well as the ability to add more than 9 flipbooks - I will even pay for a premium version with those features. Being the first version I'm still very amazed at the quality and layout.
JessAug 19th 2010 2:39PM
Flipboard is awesome, RSS feeds or not. Too bad I can't connect Twitter right now, but everything I am seeing is awesome!