Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2010 > July > 21
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
‘Flipboard’ for iPad: overhyped, yet still hot
The hype cycle for smart phones, mobile apps and anything to do with Apple continues to get shorter.
After 25 minutes Tuesday night, I was already sick of hearing about “Flipboard,” a new app for the iPad. The app was revealed by tech evangelist Robert Scoble, the P.T. Barnum of technology (or perhaps he’s our Michael Bay). After teasing followers for several days that a new, revolutionary social reading app was on its way.
At about 11 p.m., “Flipboard” was revealed with a video featuring the CEO of Flipboard, Inc. (embedded below). Within minutes, Twitter reverberated with Tweets hailing the app as game-changing and revolutionary. (Never mind that most of those posting hadn’t even seen the app yet for themselves).
So what is “Flipboard?” It’s an app that takes news feeds from blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable, photo blogs, or posts on Twitter and Facebook, and turns them into lovely pages laid out in the style of a magazine.
Photo pages look gorgeous on it, but even pages of text-only Tweets are laid out neatly and with lots of white space. If your friends post photos to Twitter or videos and news stories to Facebook, those get rolled into the mix, too, taking on the appearance of a newspaper or magazine with embedded multimedia.
Unfortunately, last night, it was nearly impossible to get the app to connect to Twitter or Facebook after Scoble and the Wall Street Journal posted about “Flipboard,” sending the hype off the charts.
The rush of traffic, which the company unwisely didn’t anticipate, has caused them to move to an invitation-only system for now. That’s too bad.
Because while I hope to feed into the hype that’s driving this particular rush of interest, I think the app is beautifully designed and the first step toward some really innovate ways to read the news and glance at your social networks on the iPad.
Unfortunately, it’s got some major limitations in this first incarnation. You can only set up nine feeds, which feels very cramped once you realize how fun “Flipboard” is to use. You can’t draw in RSS feeds, only Twitter lists and pre-built feeds from Flipboard like photo and tech sources they’ve configured.
And, the biggest problem to my mind, is that there’s no real heirarchy over what’s important and worth your attention. The reason newspapers and magazines have editors and designers is to judge newsworthiness and help decide what’s worth the reader’s time. Though the pages “Flipboard” produces are lovely, there doesn’t seem to be any real rhyme or reason to how content is displayed. An ugly Twitpic seems to have more weight than a very newsy Tweet in the same feed and the software has no way of knowing which is more important.
That being said, I think if “Flipboard” is very careful about the sources it provides and finds ways to lets its users filter content or scope out keyboards, it could be incredibly powerful.
That said, the minimalist design suggests to me that “Flipboard” is more about discovery and good design than about providing a kitchen-sink set of tools like “TweetDeck.” We’ll just have to see how it evolves.
Is it the future of reading on the iPad? I have to believe that other developers are working on similar products. But I think it’s a very nice app, and given that it’s free, it’s one that every iPad owner should test drive. You can find it here. When the hype dies down a bit, maybe it’ll be available for everyone.
Below: some screengrabs I captured while playing with “Flipboard” this morning.
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