At the risk of starting to sound like the crazy iPad guy, I’m going to start another thread about an iPad app, because this one is very interesting.
It’s called Flipboard. Here’s a video demonstration.
It’s a bit like an RSS reader, but not really. What it is, is a tool for allowing content to be curated by the public. It uses your twitter feed as a source for content, and automatically follows links and renders the linked pages. The result is that it looks like a magazine, only built up of articles and pictures your friends want you to see or that are recommended to you by people you trust to have good taste.
I find this interesting because I’ve always thought of twitter as ‘raw data’. It’s a data stream of information, and looking at it in its raw form isn’t really what you want to do. Rather, you want to use it to feed data into applications that make use of it.
In this app, your twitter feed becomes your data for a crowd-sourced magazine. In other apps, there might be other ways that it’s used. For example I can envision an app where you can set up auto-searches for specific phrases or words, then set up rules to analyze the incoming data stream and notify you when something interesting happens.
I think this is the first time I really ‘got’ what twitter was all about, and why so many people are excited about it. It’s really just the data stream of the public conversation, and the tools to filter and direct and aggregate and curate it. It’s pretty cool.
Flipboard does the same thing with Facebook - scraping your newsfeed for external links and building articles out of them, and organizing it along with comments from your wall, photos from friends, etc.
Anyway, Flipboard is awesome. It’s really strange to read what feels like a professional magazine and see an article from the New Scientist with a sidebar consisting of a comment from one of your friends, and a photo from your friend’s last party. But in a way, it makes reading more of a social experience, like Facebook with actual good content.
The app is free, so if you’ve got an iPad, I highly recommend trying it out. if you install it, you may find that you have to wait for an invite to set up your twitter and Facebook feeds. They company has been swamped by unexpected demand. But even without that set up, it comes pre-populated with a number of content aggregations that you can follow. For example, if you subscribe to the “LongForm” feed, it will give you a magazine filled with internet articles that are longer and more in-depth, on a variety of subjects. And whoever is curating it is doing a great job because almost every page on mine currently has something I’d like to read.
If enough people use this, we could start a Straightdope feed, and anyone could drop links to interesting article, pictures, whatever. Then they’ll just appear in the “SDMB Magazine”. That’d be pretty cool.
:rolleyes: