Flipboard: A social magazine for your iPad
flipboard.com
flipboard.com
Except the stuff I care about will never be in just one place. Somehow "more stuff you care about, all in yet another place" doesn't have the same ring to it.
To be clear: I don't mean to knock Flipboard. I'm very impressed with their high quality work, and I'm sure it can be a fun and useful tool. I'm just interested in the broader notion of "all in one place."
My hypothesis is that there will never be "one true venue" for finding news. We're foragers by nature. Our valuation of a piece of content is (in part) proportional to how hard that content was to find. We will always seek new venues for content discovery.
However, I suspect that the app will do very well without users like you and me.
I haven't yet tried out the app, but it does seem like they are meeting the needs of a large market (and seem to have impressed a lot of "tech journalists")
Tech journalists like to make out that everyone is sitting in their home tweeting. It's just not the reality though.
In this century, when everyone with at least a smidgen of desire can publish to a worldwide audience, and when anyone who doesn't want a worldwide audience has to carefully hide their paper diary lest someone scan it, the assumption that most good contemporary writers can be found on the web is not half bad, and it gets better every day.
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[1] there is, of course, always room for a larger variety of people to take up the art of writing well in English.
One corollary of "we will always seek new venues for content discovery" might be "there will always be opportunity in [interesting] new venues for content discovery." Flipboard, Pulse, etc. represent a fresh new category of venues.
This is all essentially duplicate content. I see these links already in twitter and facebook. All this does is display them prettily. And people hate seeing stuff that is "new" that they've already seen. Better to show no content.
All the feedback set out in the Apollo News thread applies here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520941
IMHO. Brilliant execution on a flawed concept.
I miss the linearity. Twitter is linear; it has a timeline. This would seem to be a nonessential feature, perhaps even a limitation, and yet I miss it when I do not see it. I feel disoriented. Though maybe if I use this Flipbook app for a while I will find it is still there, just slightly obscured.
I might prefer to read some twitter feeds as tweets, and others through an app like this. Time for multiple Twitter accounts, perhaps.
A very interesting experiment.
Ehm, wtf? Why does it even need a Flipboard server? What happens to my twitter account info? All they need is a XAuth token, right?
"...Well, it has a set of algorithms that are looking for highly engaged items. You know, items that have lots of comments, likes, or retweets. It also has an algorithm that senses photography that’s been linked to from Facebook status messages and it lays those photos out."
Quoted from: http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/20/exclusive-first-look-at-rev...
Something like: "We need to send your Twitter/Facebook stream to our servers to work our magic and present you only the signal instead of the noise"
They may use personally identifiable information to send "marketing or promotional materials," so perhaps that's how they plan to make money.
These tech product demos by him are getting played out pretty fast.
Edit: Facebook's still not working, but the other channels are. One thing's for sure: it's the best way to browse HN on an iPad.
I would actually like to do that as well but my sense for design is not up to their standards.
Really? There are no comments, you can't login, and you have to bounce to Safari to actually read anything. It doesn't even look that slick. What's the point?
Damn, I need a second set of working hours to spend learning Cocoa and/or HTML5!
Sold!
Well, obviously not since I'm participating in them, but wow are comments over-rated.
For example, it took me a while to start using google reader, google calendar. I told all my friends how great those tools are, but none of them has converted.
People are used to their twitter, facebook, newspaper interfaces. Crossing the chasm from early power users to mainstream users will be hard.
Looks great. I don't have an iPad to use it, but the interaction in the video looks promising.
[Edit] I Just read that Jack Dorsey is one of Investors. perhaps that explains the video demo similarities. same resources?
I don't get it, but maybe testing showed that people liked it?
I guess they were trying to justify their name and logo.
It seems like a chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. :)
I just can't figure out why they would want it in the first place. I assume they did beta testing.
http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/20/exclusive-first-look-at-rev...
I really like that kind of re-presentation of content. The "Times" app does something similar on Mac for feeds.
At least visually, I find it very appealing. I don't know if it's because of the variety of layout, or if somehow decades of newspapers and magazines have taught us to like content displayed in a certain way, but I feel that I'd be more interested in reading articles like this.
However, in the case of Times, (which admittedly doesn't look nearly as sexy as this) I ended up not using so much and going back to Google Reader…
Addition features: offline mode Google reader integration with like and share buttons Post article to blog
Regards,
Steve
Content needs exclusivity, at least in my opinion. That’s why I still use feeds for notification of new content and I always consume it on the original site.
I wonder what its integration with the browser is like? I'm not sure if it'd be better to have a separate app for my Google Reader and Hacker News, but those are both sources I'd like to read in this format.
{"success":false,"errormessage":"flipboard is over capacity"}