Friday, July 23, 2010

Everyone loves Flipboard

Flipboard is a new app for the iPad.  It takes aggregated content and presents it in a really engaging way (see the video).



You can add all sorts of content; they have curated streams to cover areas like technology and style, blogs like Boing Boing, twitter streams from The Economist, and even The Onion. 

Better still you can sign in to your Facebook and Twitter account, and see your friends links and pictures presented visually.  (Except that they're currently snowed under by demand.  When they can cope with the demand better you'll also be able to incorporate someone's twitter list).

Everyone I've shown it to loves it.  Apparently the tech blogger Robert Scoble (who curates a couple of feeds) showed it to Ashton Kutcher, and he wanted to invest in the company.

It's already looking like the next big thing, and these are some of the future directions I see for it:

1 - Brand channels - brands acting as curators.  They could make a lot of money through this

2 - Content owners like The Guardian skipping the step of having their own iPad app, and just using the Flipboard technology

3 - Setting up your own set of feeds, like in iGoogle, to create your own personalised magazine, and then letting friends see this as well.  In fact you can already do this through twitter lists, but you could make it easier to chop and change within the app

4 - A cached version.  At present it only works if you're online.  For flights and the tube it would be great to have a cached version of the last x days from your favourite feeds.

This is going to be a game-changing piece of technology!

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